Ever heard of Chip Gannasi’s private testing tunnel

New one to me, and I even had a cousin heavily involved with NASCAR teams back then.  Interesting, even if the narrator isn't, exactly...

While they don't go in depth, the story behind the tunnel's construction is really interesting. During the 1880s, you had Commodore Vanderbilt's New York Central Railroad that left New York City and went up the east shore of the Hudson River and then west across New York, and then you had the New York, West Shore & Buffalo Railroad that accessed New York City through Weehawken, then ran up the west shore of the Hudson River and ran pretty much parallel to the New York Central out to Buffalo. As a direct competitor to his New York Central, Vanderbilt drove the West Shore into bankruptcy via a brutal rate-war that the West Shore could not financially withstand.

The West Shore was then bought up by the Pennsylvania Railroad, which was the main rival to the New York Central, who realized that ownership of it would allow the Pennsylvania Railroad to penetrate deep into New York Central territory. New York Central fired back by beginning construction of the South Pennsylvania Railroad, which would mirror the Pennsylvania Railroad's route through PA. A destructive rate-war loomed and top railroad financier J.P. Morgan stepped in to prevent that from happening. He held and intervention with the two railroads' presidents, aboard his steam yacht "Corsair" in New York Harbor, and forced the Pennsylvania Railroad and New York Central railroad into an agreement under which the New York Central would buy the West Shore and stop building the South Pennsylvania. Construction on the South Pennsylvania hadn't progressed past basic excavating and construction of tunnels, there were never any rails laid down, and it laid incomplete until 1940, when large chunks of the road, including the Laurel Hill Tunnel, were used for the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

I've biked through and explored two other abandoned turnpike tunnels in the area. They're pretty cool.

I tried to hike to the testing tunnel and it's pretty difficult going through the thick woods.

You can pull off of the existing PA turnpike and into the parking area of the testing tunnel, however there is sometimes a state trooper parked there that will chase you off. This happened to me. I pulled over to snap some pics and the cop immediately drove over to me and got out to see what I was doing. Instead of taking pics, I pretended that I needed to rearrange the 2 bicycles in the back of my Honda Fit and played dumb about the tunnel. He told me that I had to leave immediately so I did, without my pics.

Yeah I heard of it back when they first started testing cars there, although it wasn't clear at first who was in charge of it. In the years before and I think during the testing, the ends of the tunnel were also often used as filming locations.

A similar tunnel has opened in the UK now:

https://www.racecar-engineering.com/articles/multimatic-motorsports-tests-at-arps-catesby-tunnel/

I remember hearing about this several years ago, I think they had an article about it in... Automobile Magazine or Road and Track maybe? It's a pretty neat concept, and certainly cheaper than going the Gene Haas route and building a super advanced wind tunnel with a rolling road in Concord.

Yes, and it's on my list of things to do. I want to bike the other 2 abandoned tunnels

i have an obsession with what the turnpike in PA used to be, probably from traveling it so much to visit family.