Exploring The Donner Railroad Tunnels

The First Transcontinental Railroad was quite an ambitious project and this video highlights what was almost certainly the largest obstacle to the completion of that project. The mountains of the Sierra Nevada are not insignificant and we all know how things can go wrong in Donner Pass (my foreign viewers should Google “the Donner Party” if they do not understand that reference). At the time this project was announced, it was exceedingly difficult for even a wagon to make it over the steep, rocky terrain of the mountain range. As such, the proposal by the chief engineer of the Central Pacific Railroad, Theodore Judah, to send the large, heavy trains THROUGH the mountain at the summit rather than over it was met with no small amount of skepticism. Well, as we all know today, Mr. Judah was not mentally ill and his bold plan worked. As mentioned in the video, it was not without a cost though. Aside from being hugely expensive, there was a tremendous loss of life involved in the construction of these railroad tunnels – especially among the many thousands of Chinese laborers toiling away to run these tunnels through the mountain. These tunnels were drilled by hand (no pneumatic drills in those days) and then blasted out with gunpowder and later nitroglycerin. They were attempting to push through solid granite though and so progress was measured in inches rather than feet (centimeters rather than meters). Just as an example, that shaft in the first tunnel? It took almost three months simply to get it down to the level where they could start working on the tunnel itself. The fastest pace the workers ever achieved on the shaft was one foot a day. This solid granite is the primary reason the tunnels (not the snowsheds) look so similar now to when they were first constructed. There was no need to do any more work on them. You’ll notice the absence of supports inside the rock tunnels (or rock that has fallen to the ground) in support of that statement. They certainly look to be in far better shape than many of the mines that we have visited – and those mines were never in operation as long as these railroad tunnels! The concrete snowsheds, of course, are more modern. The original snowsheds were constructed of wood and stretched for many, many miles. There are some great pictures of them to be found online should viewers be curious. The final train ran through the tunnels in 1993 when rail service was switched to a new 10,322-foot tunnel to the south (under the same mountain).