The Pittsburgh Ledger: Posted, August 9, 2026
Three stories this week: a 73-year-old hole in a hill that nobody can make people drive through faster, a bullpen rebuilt in seventy-two hours, and a steak the whole country has heard of.
Every Sunday, this space closes the books on the week: what the Ledger published, what it added up to, and what is coming next.
The spotlight: eight feet a day
The Squirrel Hill Tunnel opened on June 5, 1953, and drivers have been mysteriously slowing down at it ever since. Why Everyone Slows Down at the Squirrel Hill Tunnel takes the whole thing apart: how it was built, what is actually inside it, and why the next $138 million spent on the problem will not touch the tunnel at all.
Some of what turned up: crews blasted through the hill at roughly eight feet a day, pulled out about 400,000 cubic yards of rock, and lost three workers doing it. For sixty years the flat ceiling overhead was not the roof of the tunnel but a suspended deck with a ventilation duct running above it, and everyone drove through the bottom half of the structure without knowing. That ceiling came out during the 2012-2014 rebuild, which also ended the era of PennDOT turning around roughly 40 overheight trucks a month at the portals.
The slowdown itself is not a mystery so much as an admission. Federal researchers filmed the morning backup frame by frame in 1961, eight years after the tunnel opened. PennDOT has said publicly for years that making people drive faster through it was never a realistic goal. Walls four feet off your shoulder do what they do. The fix coming in 2029 rearranges the ramps outside instead.
Deadline week
The Pirates spent five days in August acting like a team that expects to play in October, which is not something they have done in a while. Four relievers in three days, then a release walks through what Ben Cherington actually did and what it cost.
The short version: Camilo Doval from the Yankees, then Luke Weaver, Kirby Yates and Lake Bachar inside a few hours on deadline day. Seven minor leaguers went out, none from the top of the system. Cash coming back from New York meant the club ended up paying less for Weaver and Doval this season than it had been paying its designated hitter. Then it released that designated hitter, Marcell Ozuna, and ate the remaining $10.5 million.
Also posted this week
Throw It on the Carrie Furnace! The Pittsburgh Steak Story Nobody Can Prove: Order a steak charred black outside and red in the middle almost anywhere in the country and somebody will call it Pittsburgh rare. There are four competing accounts of where the name came from and not one of them has ever been documented. Wikipedia flags its own entry. Meanwhile a steakhouse group outside Minneapolis operates as Pittsburgh Blue, explaining our steelworkers to Minnesotans.
One open question from that piece, and we would like local help with it: have you ordered a steak Pittsburgh rare in Pittsburgh, and did the kitchen know what you meant? Answers by email or in the comments on our social posts all count.
In the ledger for next week
Amtrak's board signed off in July on running a second daily Pennsylvanian between Pittsburgh and New York, and the commonwealth has committed more than $200 million to the track work that makes it possible. None of that money is being spent west of Pittsburgh. Beaver County has the rails, the bridges and most of its old depots, including a station in Beaver that has been restored and put back to work as something other than a station. What it does not have is a platform anyone can wait on, even though an Amtrak train passes through the county twice a day, both times in the dark.
See you next Sunday.
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