Wheeling Tunnel
tunnel in West Virginia
The Wheeling Tunnel is a set of twin tunnels named for and located in Wheeling, West Virginia. The tunnels are 0.27 miles (430 m) long each, cutting through Wheeling Hill, and each carries two lanes of Interstate 70 and U.S. Route 250. The tunnels originally took three years to construct, costing $6.9 million. Reconstruction of the tunnel, originally planned to take a total of 6 months, took over three years to complete between 2007 and 2010, at a cost of $13.7 million.
Overview
The Wheeling Tunnel sits between exits 1A and 1B on Interstate 70 and U.S. Route 250, which run concurrent through the city of Wheeling. The tunnel cuts through Wheeling Hill, and has two travel lanes in each tube. Due to the closeness of exit 1A to the western end of the tunnels, the tunnels' right lanes function as acceleration and deceleration lanes. Through traffic is restricted to the left lane in each tunnel and lane changes are prohibited.
A series of accidents involving semi-trailer trucks prompted local political candidates to push for trucks to be banned from the tunnel, diverting them to the nearby I-470.
Construction
The twin tunnels, which cost $6.9 million (equivalent to $73 million in 2025) to construct, are lined with a total of 13,000 square feet (1,200 m2) of industrial tile.
The public source identifies “Wheeling Tunnel” as tunnel in West Virginia. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Wheeling, Tunnel and tunnel.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7992318. Authority coordinates are 40.073, -80.720. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2007, 2010 and 2025.
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This entry incorporates text from “Wheeling Tunnel” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.