Line revision on the New York Central—tunnelling through the bases of these
jutting peaks along the Hudson River does away with sharp and dangerous curves
Impressive grade revision on the Union Pacific in the Black Hills of Wyoming.
The discarded line may be seen at the right
It is not generally understood that the summit of the Union Pacific is in the Black Hills, which are the first foothill range of the Rockies, rather than in the mountain crest beyond. The Black Hills have always been a baffling proposition, with their short, steep slopes. The engineers wrinkled their brows at the thought of correcting the old line through there, but Harriman simply said that they must, that the board—which meant E. H. Harriman himself—had directed that 247 feet be cut from the road’s crest there; and 247 feet, almost to the inch, was cut. It took giant fills and embankments and an army of men but the grades were brought to a minimum for a Rocky Mountain stretch. Wooden trestles, old and affording a constant fire-risk, were swallowed up in embankments; a single slice through a hill-top, a quarter of a mile long and eighty feet deep, did its part in reducing the grades; antiquated cars disappeared before equipment of the modern class; dilapidated shanties were supplanted by fine, permanent railroad stations. The new Union Pacific is a monument to the reconstruction engineer—and to E. H. Harriman.
The Canadian Pacific Railway, while traversing but one small northeastern corner of the United States, is essentially an American railroad, both in equipment and in operation. It forms an important half of that all-British Red Line encircling the globe, of which any Englishman is so very proud. When the Canadian Pacific Railway was completing its last link in this unbroken line of rails from St. John, N. B., and Montreal, to Vancouver, the question of grades was indeed a secondary one. The vital thing was to cut the line through, and to that end great sacrifices of grade efficiency were made. So that when the line was through, and the first Imperial Limited was making its way from the Atlantic to the Pacific over a single railroad system, it was indeed a line with structural defects. At one point—the famous Big Hill, near Field, Alta.—in order to overcome the steep Rocky Mountain climbs, it was necessary to use from four to six engines for comparatively light freight and passenger trains. And at that, it was difficult to attain a speed of more than four or five miles an hour.
Within the last three years, this fearful grade has been corrected by the very first spiral tunnels ever built upon the American continent. Spiral tunnel construction of this kind is not new. It has been used with remarkable success by the railroads of Continental Europe, in piercing the High-Alpine boundaries between France, Germany, Austria, and Italy.
Coming from the east on the Canadian Pacific Railway, the train first enters the spiral tunnel—they call it the “corkscrew” out in Alberta—under Cathedral Mountain. This first bore is some 3,200 feet in length. Emerging from it, the train runs back east across the Kicking Horse River, then enters the eastern spiral tunnel, and after describing an elliptic curve, emerges, and again crosses the Kicking Horse westward. This whole thing is a perfect maze—the railroad doubling back upon itself twice, tunnelling under two mountains, and crossing the river twice in order to cut down the grade. The work cost $1,500,000. The mere cost of the explosives came to over $250,000. It was one of the really great tunnel jobs of the world. Yet despite the complicated work caused by the spiral shape of the tunnels, they met exactly. The worth of the thing to the Canadian Pacific is shown in the fact that those same trains that formerly required four to six engines, are now handled easily over this Big-Hill grade with but two engines, and at a speed of about twenty-five miles an hour.
Other railroads by the dozen, whose lines traverse mountainous or even hilly country, are engaged in this proposition of lowering their grades. F. D. Underwood, president of the Erie, and known as one of the ablest operating heads in this country, has been engaged in cutting off some of the heavy hill-climbs on that old-time route from the seaboard to the lakes. Underwood has already seen Erie’s hopes of success in developing the property as essentially a freighter and for the immediate improvement of that portion of its facilities he has built three new relief lines, a small stretch near Chautauqua Lake in western New York, and then through the upper Genesee Valley, the third and most important eastward from a point near Port Jervis and piercing the summit of the Shawangunk Mountains.
The line through the Genesee Valley extends from Hunts, on the Buffalo division, about 20 miles west of Hornell, to Hinsdale on the main line, and is 33 miles long. It cuts off a heavy grade between Hornell and Hinsdale on the main line—a little over one per cent—for both east-bound and west-bound freight. At that particular point, Erie’s west-bound freight approximates 75 per cent of the east-bound, and so the new line recognizes that fact by establishing the west-bound maximum grade at 3-10 of one per cent, as against a maximum of 2-10 of one per cent in the other direction. Brought to a plain understanding, a single locomotive has no difficulty in handling 80 cars, each bearing 40 tons of coal, over this new low-grade line. To take one-half that load over the old main line required a pusher.