![]() ![]() The tracks have been removed, and the path is now an unmarked trail. Just above the wall is a section of the railroad that is no longer in use but is accessible to intrepid hikers. Called an "engineering marvel" by the Truckee-Donner Historical Society, which installed the plaque, the wall was constructed by Chinese "master builders" who made it by stacking stones, one on top of the other, without any cement or mortar. Near the Tahoe National Forest, along Donner Pass Road, a plaque calls attention to the "China Wall", a 75ft retaining wall that still firmly holds the dirt above it in place today so that landslides didn't bury the track. It's also possible to get a closer look at the Chinese labourers' work on foot. ![]() (The rest of the line, connecting the San Francisco Bay Area and Chicago, runs on a different route forged after the original Transcontinental railroad.) Climbing through the Sierra Nevada mountains, the trip offers expansive views of snow-capped peaks and swaths of towering pine and fir trees. Today, Amtrak's Zephyr train still chugs along much of the most arduous portions made by Chinese workers more than 150 years ago. And it came at a heavy cost: an estimated 1,200 Chinese labourers died during the six-year construction, and those that survived endured racial discrimination and threats. But the project also devastated forests, displaced many Native American tribes and rapidly expanded Anglo-European influence across the country. As new towns sprung up along the rail line, it changed where Americans lived, spurred westward expansion and made travel more affordable. It caused trade to flourish, and by 1880, the railroad was moving $50m worth of freight each year. This monumental engineering feat had massive effects for the US. Look closely, Hsu said, and "you can still see the drill marks". This strenuous construction process meant that workers only cleared inches a day it took two and a half years to bore through the nearly 1,700ft-long tunnel at Donner Summit. This was how they drilled the hole to then pack the black powder, light it and run. Then they would rotate the bar a quarter turn and pound it again, and so on. ![]() "A fifth man would pound it with a sledgehammer. "It took four men to hold a big iron bar to manually drill a hole into the granite," said Hsu, director of research for Stanford's Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project (CRWNAP), which seeks to shed more light on the experiences of Chinese railroad workers. Instead, in the 1860s, teams of Chinese labourers blasted through the granite and painstakingly hand-chiselled 15 shafts through the Sierra Nevada so that the first transcontinental railroad could whisk passengers 1,800 miles from Sacramento, California, to Omaha, Nebraska, cutting travel times from six months to just six days and forever transforming the nation. Jagged and bumpy, the walls of the tunnel hardly resemble underpasses made by modern-day machinery. "You can almost feel the pain it took," said Roland Hsu, standing inside the train tunnels along Donner Summit in California's Sierra Nevada mountains. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |