Originally a rail line, the engineers decided to chop through the rocky fin rather than demolish it. Making for a very thin "tunnel". Located five miles outside Damascus, VA, it's actually just across the border in Tennessee.
Backbone Rock tunnel measures only twenty feet wide and stands seventy-five foot high. This unusual sedimentary rock formation, a ridge of the Holston Mountain in the Cherokee National Forest, stood in the way of a train route designed to connect Damascus and Shady Valley,Tennessee.
The cheapest solution was to blast a hole in the rock... but oops, they forgot to make a hole large enough for the smokestacks too! They hand chiseled a rough gap in the stone, and the Beaver Dam Railroad started hauling as much as 100,000 sawed boards daily for The Tennessee Lumber and Manufacturing Company.
By 1913 logging had played out, and operations shut down for both the lumber mill and the secondary industry of mining manganese ore. Afterwards the United States Forest Service used the railway line as a truck trail, and it eventually became state route 133
On top it's about 10 feet wide. A trail goes up and over the road.
https://itsgreenmon.blogspot.com/2017/09/sept-26-backbone-rock-falls.html
https://tilthelasthemlockdies.blogspot.com/2008/11/social-gathering.html
http://knoxzine.com/better-living/travel/2013/10/06/1745/
http://johnsoncountytnchamber.org/backbone-rock/
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