Nothing Like It in the World The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869 (76 page)

A CP train going through Bloomer Cut, just beyond Newcastle, California. It was 63 feet deep and 800 feet long. Every foot of the way had to be blasted with gunpowder, and the CP used five hundred kegs of powder a day to do it. It was completed in the spring of 1865 and still stands today, although the line now runs through two tunnels to the north.

Fort Point Cut in the mountains. It was 70 feet deep and 600 feet long. The Chinese hauled away the debris layer after layer.

A freight train rounding Cape Horn, California. Cape Horn is just short (west) of Dutch Flat. It was three miles long. The Chinese laborers did the work of blasting out and making the roadbed. The slope was at an angle of seventy-five degrees and the American River was 1,200 to 2,200 feet below the line of the railroad. One magazine commented, “Good engineers considered the undertaking preposterous.” Work began in the summer of 1865 and was completed in the spring of 1866.

Top left:
Taken in the summer of 1867, this photo shows a Chinese tea carrier outside one of the thirteen tunnels the CP drilled through the Sierra Nevada. Left: Another worker is hauling debris out of the east portal of the Summit Tunnel (length: 1,659 feet), which was drilled through both ends and from the inside out in both directions. Above: The tunnel before completion. The CP began drilling in the fall of 1865, and the Chinese worked twentyfour hours a day. The first train went through on November 30, 1867.

And then the snows came. The winter of 1866-67 was one of the worst ever. The CP tried everything to get through the snow j but even these gigantic plows on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada couldn't buck their way through. Eventually the CP built miles and miles of snowsheds; at left is a photograph taken by Albert Hart of the frame for one of them. This was one of the early, experimental ones, between Cisco and Summit, built in 1867.

Donner Lake as seen from the summit. The west portals of Tunnels 7 and 8 can be seen. The track hugs the mountains and the south side of the lake. Photo taken summer 1867.

In 1868 the CP track got through the Sierra Nevada and down to the Truckee River. This is a Howe truss bridge across the river at Eagle Gap.

Superintendent of Construction James Harvey Strobridge's car at the end of the track. He was the only man on either railroad to bring his wife and all the other comforts of home. Photo taken probably in summer 1868 in Nevada.

By 1868 the CP was laying out track in the Nevada desert. That meant the men, horses, and engines had to have water. Here Locomotive 49, the
El Dorado,
fills its containers at Humboldt Lake to take water to the end of the track.

The first construction train to go through Palisade Canyon in eastern Nevada., along the Humboldt River. Below: An Indian looks down at the CP from the top of the canyon. Photos taken in late 1868.

The race ended in the spring of 1869. Leland Stanford and his party at Devils Gate Bridge, east ofOgden, Utah, on Weber River, May 8, 1869. They were just looking around, waiting for the UP to reach Promontory Summit for the driving of the last spike, and for Durant to be released from the workers who had held up his train at Piedmont.