To bring the Kicking Horse Pass section of the line within the recognition of the Government, however, entailed the expenditure of some,£300,000, or $1,500,000, and found employment for about 1000 men for twenty months. Train-load after train-load of dynamite was brought up in order to enable the path to be hewn through the mountain flanks, and by the time the task was completed over 1,500,000 pounds of explosives had been used—something like,£50,000, or $250,000, had vanished literally in smoke to tear down the rock. But the outlay will be recouped well. Where four engines were required formerly two now suffice to handle a 700-ton train, and they can rattle through the Pass at a steady 25 miles an hour, whereas previously a bare six miles could be notched.
Emerging from the Rockies the engineers were confronted by another towering obstacle—the Selkirks. This range was to be dreaded more than the barrier just left behind, for there was a trail through the Rockies to guide the engineers, whereas the Selkirks had never been threaded. The Indians and Hudson’s Bay voyageurs, after emerging from the Rockies, turned sharply south to follow the Columbia River.
The first task, therefore, was to discover a rift through the Selkirks through which the metals might be carried. It was shorter to go through the mountains than to go round them if any pass could be found to exist. Major Albert B. Rogers, an American engineer, accordingly saddled his horse and with a supply of provisions set off to search for a “Pass.” He wandered up and down the range without success for week after week, and then, just as he was despairing of success, his eye alighted on a narrow breach between two serried lines of snow-clad peaks. He spurred forward, traversing territory on which the feet of neither white nor red man had been planted, climbing and toiling arduously among the crags, until at last he gained an altitude of 4,351 feet, from which the opposite sides of the range sloped down once more to the Columbia River Valley.
THE STEEL ARCH BRIDGE ACROSS STONEY CREEK IN THE SELKIRK MOUNTAINS
This graceful structure replaced a wooden bridge supported on timber towers 200 feet in height.
Rogers’ Pass, as this defile through the Selkirks was named in honour of the discoverer, was followed. It did not offer any great difficulties from the grading point of view. The greatest enemy was snow and avalanche. The snowfall among these mountains is the heaviest along the line, while the avalanches are of terrible frequency. Consequently the absorbing question was how to keep the line intact after once it had been laid. It was impossible to avoid the defined paths of the snow movements entirely, and in these cases huge sheds had to be erected to carry the avalanche harmlessly over the track to expend its violence in the gulch below. The extent of snow-shedding through the Selkirks is amazing, and it has proved terribly costly.
THE RAILWAY TRAVERSING THE TUMBLED THOMPSON RIVER CANYON
When the engineers attacked this country, as the laying of the track was the paramount requirement it was pushed forward with all speed during the short summer, and parties of men equipped with meteorological instruments, and vehicles for movement during winter, and supplies of stores, were left at different points to study the snow question, so as to collect data for the situation of the snow-sheds. There was no difficulty in determining this latter point, for the avalanches appeared to rain down upon the track from all sides. The question was not so much where to introduce the sheds, but where they could be omitted. It appeared as if the line would have to be carried almost continuously through a wooden tunnel to ensure its safety.