The excavation seems to have been conducted, after the plan practised at the present time, by means of a number of vertical shafts first sunk on the line of the tunnel, and from the bottom of these shafts the work was carried on simultaneously in opposite directions.
Another tunnel, made in the early period of the Roman republic for the partial drainage of the Alban Lake, is more than one mile long.
TUNNELS IN AMERICA.
Most of the tunnels in America are on the lines crossing the Alleghany Mountains. There is one tunnel on the Pennsylvania Railway thirty-six hundred feet long. It was built in two years, and cost half a million dollars. There are many short tunnels on the line of the Baltimore and Ohio Railway? and there is a tunnel on the Blue Ridge Railway in Virginia forty-two hundred feet long. In South Carolina there are several tunnels, one of them nearly six thousand feet long. The Long Dock Tunnel in Bergen, New Jersey, opposite New York city, was completed in 1860. It is forty-three hundred feet long, twenty-three feet high, and thirty feet wide. On the line of the Central Pacific Railway, over the Sierra Nevada Mountains, there are several tunnels, the longest of them exceeding a mile; and railway engineering was carried to such perfection in the construction of this road that its tunnels were completed in a shorter time than in works of the same kind and with an equal hardness of rock anywhere else in the United States.
A journey through a railway tunnel is always more or less interesting to a novice, but an old traveller soon gets accustomed to it, and pays very little attention. On most roads, when a long tunnel is approached, it is customary in the daytime to light the lamps but this is by no means the general rule. Some queer incidents occur in these dark journeys through tunnels.
The darkness is so thick that one could almost cut it with a knife. It affords opportunities for enterprise, either for entertainment or mischief. Enterprising robbers sometimes conduct their operations in railway tunnels. Half a dozen of them will jostle a passenger, pick his pocket, and carry away his satchel, and when he emerges from the tunnel the robbers will have disappeared. It not unfrequently happens that loving couples bestow attentions upon each other in passing through tunnels which they would hardly indulge in were they in open daylight, and under the eyes of their fellow-passengers.
Every one has read, and many have seen, demure couples sitting quietly in their seats as the train enters a tunnel. There would be heard the sounds of a slight struggle, and also of less slight kisses. When the train emerges into the daylight, the pair will be sitting as demure as ever, but with reddened cheeks and a general appearance of disorder.
INCIDENT IN BERGEN TUNNEL.
On one occasion I was riding on a train approaching the Bergen Tunnel, near New York. The lamps were not trimmed and burning, and when in the tunnel we were as much in the dark as an ignorant newsboy attempting to read a page of Sanscrit.
In front of me was a young couple, and by their devoted attention to each other I concluded that they were not married, or, if married, were wedded to somebody else than to themselves. The gentleman was reading a newspaper; the lady was busy with a novel, and giving an occasional glance out of the window. As soon as the train entered the tunnel it was so dark that you could not see anything. I heard a struggle. There seemed to be a dislocation of hair, accompanied by a shower of hair pins. The gentleman’s hat fell to the floor, and I heard his paper crush as though it had been taken up by a clothes-wringer. Then there were several warm osculations, accompanied by ejaculations which sounded like, “You ought to be ashamed. Somebody will hear you.”