Tunnels and Sheds, Rails and Trails
Donner Pass, California - Sunday, 29 July 2018, 3pm
From where we stood looking down at Donner Lake at up at "China Wall" (previous blog) it was only a short scramble to the old rail bed of the Trancontinental Railroad (Wikipedia link). It's the old rail bed because it's the original rail route, part of the First Transcontinental Railroad built starting in 1863 and put into full service in 1869. A second rail route, "track 2", was completed nearby in 1925. For many years both tracks were operated; but in 1993 the railroad owner chose to decommission the original track 1 and remove its rails.
A concrete "snow shed" stands in front of the entrance to the Transcontinental Railroad's Summit Tunnel
Building rail through the steep Sierra Nevada mountain range meant blasting out lots of solid granite, sometimes to make a shelf or cut for the rail bed, other times to bore a tunnel through a mountain. Eleven tunnels were constructed for the original route in the Sierra Nevada, seven of them here on the east side of the Donner Pass alone. The longest tunnel was the Summit Tunnel, at 1,660 feet (510 m).
In addition to blasting cuts and tunnels through the rock, laborers also built "snow sheds" to protect the track from deep piles of snow falling off steep cliffs and deep drifts. Up above 7,000 feet elevation in the Sierra these could easily grow deeper than a locomotive with a plow could clear. Originally the sheds were constructed of timber. Sometime later the timber sheds were replaced with the concrete slabs visible in the pictures above and below.
At the mouth of the 1,660' (510 m) Summit Tunnel
Because the rail has been decommissioned and physical removed it's now safe to walk this part of the First Transcontinental Railroad's route. We explored some of the shedded areas and walked the Summit Tunnel end-to-end and back. We did it without artificial light, BTW. There are no lights in the tunnel, only the natural light entering from the two ends one-third of a mile apart.
While the longest tunnel on the original route is only 1,660 feet long some of the snow sheds are significantly longer. We entered this one, on the far side of one of the tunnels, which curves around peaks near the summit for over one mile.
Inside a snow shed (which is technically not a tunnel) over a mile long
Note the light in the shed is natural- it's sunlight coming through narrow windows and an overhead hole in the man-made structure.
Being out here seeing the actual route of the First Transcontinental Railroad has been an interesting bookend to our visit to the California State Railroad Museum a few years ago. There, we read about the history of the project and saw some of the locomotives that traversed it. Here we saw first-hand the terrain challenges the builders faced and how they solved them.
Next: Multiple generations of transportation in one place.
From where we stood looking down at Donner Lake at up at "China Wall" (previous blog) it was only a short scramble to the old rail bed of the Trancontinental Railroad (Wikipedia link). It's the old rail bed because it's the original rail route, part of the First Transcontinental Railroad built starting in 1863 and put into full service in 1869. A second rail route, "track 2", was completed nearby in 1925. For many years both tracks were operated; but in 1993 the railroad owner chose to decommission the original track 1 and remove its rails.
A concrete "snow shed" stands in front of the entrance to the Transcontinental Railroad's Summit Tunnel
Building rail through the steep Sierra Nevada mountain range meant blasting out lots of solid granite, sometimes to make a shelf or cut for the rail bed, other times to bore a tunnel through a mountain. Eleven tunnels were constructed for the original route in the Sierra Nevada, seven of them here on the east side of the Donner Pass alone. The longest tunnel was the Summit Tunnel, at 1,660 feet (510 m).
In addition to blasting cuts and tunnels through the rock, laborers also built "snow sheds" to protect the track from deep piles of snow falling off steep cliffs and deep drifts. Up above 7,000 feet elevation in the Sierra these could easily grow deeper than a locomotive with a plow could clear. Originally the sheds were constructed of timber. Sometime later the timber sheds were replaced with the concrete slabs visible in the pictures above and below.
At the mouth of the 1,660' (510 m) Summit Tunnel
Because the rail has been decommissioned and physical removed it's now safe to walk this part of the First Transcontinental Railroad's route. We explored some of the shedded areas and walked the Summit Tunnel end-to-end and back. We did it without artificial light, BTW. There are no lights in the tunnel, only the natural light entering from the two ends one-third of a mile apart.
While the longest tunnel on the original route is only 1,660 feet long some of the snow sheds are significantly longer. We entered this one, on the far side of one of the tunnels, which curves around peaks near the summit for over one mile.
Inside a snow shed (which is technically not a tunnel) over a mile long
Note the light in the shed is natural- it's sunlight coming through narrow windows and an overhead hole in the man-made structure.
Being out here seeing the actual route of the First Transcontinental Railroad has been an interesting bookend to our visit to the California State Railroad Museum a few years ago. There, we read about the history of the project and saw some of the locomotives that traversed it. Here we saw first-hand the terrain challenges the builders faced and how they solved them.
Next: Multiple generations of transportation in one place.