Flooding from the river water during years of heavy storms (not every year), rock slides, mud slides
Sidehill construction a la Western Pacific, including the tunnelling, is about 20X more expensive than simple embankment in open country. The contractors building the WP were charging about $150,000/mile in the canyon and about $8,000/mile in the open desert, for the grading.
Now, once it’s built, the fun begins. The sides of the cuts tend to slough into the ditches, especially under the influence of precipitation. The ditches have to be cleaned out to provice adequate drainage for the subgrade as well as to have a repository for the material that keeps coming down so it doesn’t end up above the rails. The WP was in very poor material in much of the canyon: weathered rock, unconsolidated soils, claystone, numerous cleavage planes and strata tilted parallel to the direction of the cuts and fills. Steep slopes with a rail grade cut into their toe are prone to try and fill in that injury. Heavy rains and rapid snowmelt overload the sidehill drainages and bring down heavy loads of rock and mud. Constant attention must be paid to culvert cleaning to prevent the clogging of culverts, saturation of the embankment, and subsequent failure of the embankment under the dynamic load of a train. Many of the embankments suffered toe cutting and scouring by waterways and runoff, and constant riprapping and bank armoring is required. Large rocks and trees fall onto the grade during rainstorms and thaws, damaging the track and potentially derailing trains. Constant track patrolling is required during periods of precipitation and slow orders limiting all trains to restricted speed (1/2 the limit of vision, not exceeding 20 mph in any case) are laid onto the
Mr. Hadid:
With that I must ask…what was the best engineered mountain crossing in the west? How about in the east?
By “best” I must qualify that by stating the best route with the best design which has withstood the test of time and is now a major crossing of a summit.
It sounds as if your opinion of WP is not all that high! Care to mention other major mountain crossings of today that dont measure up?
ed
So why doesn’t the UP chose?
They’re maintaining and operating two lines over the Sierra. It’s got to be expensive. They’ve got to get a route over the Sierra open for two 9’ 6" stacked containers.
Is it that they are putting all thier capital into the Sunset Route?
Ed:
There’s no question about it – the best-located route in the West is the Sunset Route and in the Official Territory it is the NYC.
Note I said “best located” not “best engineered.” Almost all of the main lines in operation today were engineered just fine, but not all of them are well-located. There is a substantial difference between the two that is often conflated.
Railway location and alignment is a two-task process. The secondary task is the alignment, the best solution to a fixed and given problem, e.g., “build a railroad connecting San Francisco and Salt Lake City, with a ruling gradient of 1.0%, running times of secondary importance, circuity not too excessive, high construction costs permissable.” This is a technical process of examining a location chosen by a client and delivering the best balance between capital costs and operating costs for the client’s capital budget and operating cost expectations. The primary task is location, a high-level decision-making process that analyzes economic geography, geographic conditions, and broad trends, and selects a location that has the highest potential for return on investment. Put another way, alignment is the process of determining the costs; location is the process of knowing what those costs mean.
The Western Pacific is well-aligned for its second-choice location but the difference between first and second choice location in this case is profound. There’s nothing that could have been done significantly better with its engineers’ solution to the location, given the cost of construction at that time and the construction budget. It’s just that the location wasn’t very good to begin with. But the client had already chosen the location – San Francisco to Salt Lake City – and couldn’t be discouraged from his decision. The CP had already taken the better alignment and had built a railroad that ful
[quote user=“1435mm”]
Sidehill construction a la Western Pacific, including the tunnelling, is about 20X more expensive than simple embankment in open country. The contractors building the WP were charging about $150,000/mile in the canyon and about $8,000/mile in the open desert, for the grading.
Now, once it’s built, the fun begins. The sides of the cuts tend to slough into the ditches, especially under the influence of precipitation. The ditches have to be cleaned out to provice adequate drainage for the subgrade as well as to have a repository for the material that keeps coming down so it doesn’t end up above the rails. The WP was in very poor material in much of the canyon: weathered rock, unconsolidated soils, claystone, numerous cleavage planes and strata tilted parallel to the direction of the cuts and fills. Steep slopes with a rail grade cut into their toe are prone to try and fill in that injury. Heavy rains and rapid snowmelt overload the sidehill drainages and bring down heavy loads of rock and mud. Constant attention must be paid to culvert cleaning to prevent the clogging of culverts, saturation of the embankment, and subsequent failure of the embankment under the dynamic load of a train. Many of the embankments suffered toe cutting and scouring by waterways and runoff, and constant riprapping and bank armoring is required. Large rocks and trees fall onto the grade during rainstorms and thaws, damaging the track and potentially derailing trains. Constant track patrolling is required during periods of precipitation and slow orders limiting all trains to restricted speed (1/2 the limit of vision, not exceeding 20 mph in any ca
Amen. MofW access is a big deal.
The CP used cheap chinese “coolie” laborers which they imported by t he thousands. Those crazy buggers hung onver the side of the mountains on ropes to set the black powder charges to cut the shelves for the track and dug the tunnels by hand and black powder. Snow sheds helped protect the trains along the route from avalances. Some of them are quite long. The original wood ones have been replaced for by concrete snow sheds. There may still be a few wooden ones up there. Inexpensive labor made the Donner route possible. I walked a good part of the Donner route from Colfax to Norden and know the tracks, snow sheds and tunnels well.
This is all pretty fascinating for a guy who lives in Indiana and gets excited about a .9% grade which stalls a coal train or two a week.
I spend a little time in Arizona nearly every year and usually make it to Flagstaff. My son and I watched BNSF train after train. The grade there wasnt too bad, but it still slowed the trains down. Cant imagine what it would be like on a major slope.
Never thought of the NYC in that category, but it does get from point to point and without much of a climb.
Perhaps Raton Pass would be one of the mountain crossings. And I always wondered why it didnt see more trains. Pretty obvious now.
ed
You may want to contact the History Channel who runs a show from time to time called The Building of the Transcontinental RR which explains why the 4 owners of the CPRR decided to go over the mountains versus some other route. I’m sure they will gladly sell you a tape of the show
Is the canyon geography similar to the one that CN keeps having derailments on(former BC Rail line, I think)?
What is the difference between a double stack and a auto carrier with regards to clearance? When or are they going to clearance the line (Donner) to be able to run stack trains? I have just relocated job wise which moved me from Davis right along side the UP line to Auburn right along the westbound line and I am really missing stack trains.
Dave
Height off top of rail:
Ordinary 8’6" tall containers double-stacked, 18’2"
High-cube 9’6" containers, double-stacked, 20’2"
Ordinary trilevel autoracks, 19’6"
Tall autoracks such as Automax, 20’2"
Minimum clearances are typically at least 2-3" above the maximum height from top of rail of the equipment, but some railroads require slightly more clearance.
Ordinary double-stacks clear on Donner already, or at least they did 15 years ago.
S. Hadid
I can’t comment on that. All canyons present risks to a railroad line within, some more than others. Canyons on the western edge of the North American continent compared to canyons in the eastern edge are typically much steeper walled, more unstable, narrower, have heavier erosion rates, and have much heavier sediment loads in side drainages. That’s a function of the age of the geology, west = younger.
S. Hadid
Thanks. I guess the reason I was asking, is that there seems to be ample photos of that line , in ctrast to the number of photos of the Feather River Canyon line. I was trying to visualize it, it figured they might be similar. From what I’ve read, it appears the Canadian roads had no other choices, but to pick the canyon routes they did, and hope for the best.
Murph-
Heading east from Vancouver, CP and CN follow the Fraser River to Hope, where the Fraser Canyon begins. At Lytton the two railways leave the Fraser and run through the Thompson Canyon, which widens out around Ashcroft. CP built through there first, and took the good side. They have instituted directional running through the canyons, with the heavier westbound traffic all on the CN. A CP coal train derailed on CN’s bridge at Lytton a few months ago, and put several loads of coal into the Thompson River. Last month a rock slide about a mile further east knocked a CN train off of the tracks.
BC Rail’s route north from Vancouver follows several rivers, including the Fraser north of where CN and CP use it. This is a very difficult route to operate, with 2.2% grades and lots of curvature. BC Rail kept trains below 90 cars, but CN decided to run 120 car trains through there and had several derailments. One of these put a tank car into the Cheackamus River which killed 500,000 fish. http://www.env.gov.bc.ca/eemp/incidents/cheakamus_05.htm Along the Fraser River is a 2.2% 35 mile hill where a CN locomotive with alleged defective brakes ran away, killing two of the three men on board.
Dale- that’s the area I was thinking of, the Fraser River canyon. That’s the one where the rail line seems top be carved into the side of a rockslide?
I guess the ultimate passenger train ride would have been the California Zephyr from Denver to San Francisco. “thru the Rockies”
The CZ entered Feather River Canyon at Portola (elevation 4834) at 805am and exited the canyon at Oroville (elevation 203) at 1125am. Mileage between the points was 116. My math shows an average speed of 35mph. This was in 1953. Have a little lunch in the diner and arrival in SF at 450pm.
The daylight spent between Denver and Helper, Ut. followed the next day thru Feather River Canyon…that would have been quite a scenic ride.
ed
Question: Did WP’s route choice through the Feather River Canyon have anything to do with a possible connection with one of the Hill Lines? I know WP preceded the Oregon Trunk and GN Klamath line by a few decades, but was that eventual connection on the minds of the WP planners at the time of it’s creation?
Also, if Donner is Choice #1 for a central corridor rail alignment, is the Feather River necessarily Choice #2? It is a striking alternative to Donner’s grades and max elevation, but was there a better Choice #2 ever considered? Maybe Yuba Pass to the north or Echo Summit (used by US Highway 50) to the south? Or was Feather River the only real rail-satisfactory alternative to Donner Pass?
The WP’s developers undoubtedly were aware of the possibility of building northward from Keddie into central Oregon, but if they gave much thought to it in 1903 they would have envisioned doing this to penetrate the Harriman territory, not the Hill territory, as at that time everything south of the Columbia River was considered to be Harriman tributary, certainly by Harriman. The Gould system was a bitter competitor of both the Harriman and Hill systems, so a connection with the Hill system or any community-of-interest arrangement would have been the last thing on George Gould’s mind.
Yes, it is indeed the second best alternative. Yuba Pass accomplishes nothing significantly better than the Feather River and Echo Summit is much inferior with unsatisfactory approaches on both sides. The beauty of Beckwourth Pass is that it has almost no eastern approach at all, just a brief ramp up from Herlong.
S. Hadid