RAILWAY TUNNELS.

TUNNELS AMONG

THE ANCIENTS. - HOW THEY WERE MADE. - MODERN TUNNELS AND THEIR LENGTH. — LAUGHABLE INCIDENTS IN RAILWAY TUNNELS. -THE TWO LOVERS. -THE ANXIOUS FRENCHMAN. ROBBERS. THE HOOSAC TUNNEL. ITS HISTORY. THE AUTHOR'S VISIT. -NATURE AND PROGRESS OF THE WORK. AN EXPLOSION. — ACCIDENT FROM NITRO-GLYCERINE. THE CENTRAL SHAFT.—THE TERRIBLE CALAMITY OF 1867.

QUITE recently I picked up a newspaper about thirty years old, and read in it an account of the great engineering difficulties which had been overcome in the construction of the Boston and Lowell Railway.

This road, twenty-five miles in length, was among the earliest constructed in America, there being less than half a dozen railway lines which are older. The account proceeded to say that the great obstacle was the deep cut through solid rock, near the city of Lowell; and I can remember, in my boyhood days, riding over this road, and as we reached the cut, the attention of passengers was called to it, and at least half our number projected their heads through the windows to look at the wonderful work. Three times was the work let out on contract, and twice did the contractors fail, one of them failing not only to complete the work, but to pay the men he employed. The third contractor succeeded, but I believe he made no money out of his speculation.

This once famous cut through solid rock is only a few hundred feet in length, and I think about forty feet in depth. It has dwarfed into almost microscopic insignificance by hundreds of other railway cuts in this country and in Europe.

Railway tunnels were at that day unknown, though tunnels existed in Europe for other purposes, some of them of very ancient date.

LENGTH AND EXTENT OF TUNNELS.

493

Tunnelling, in civil engineering, is an underground passage usually constructed for conducting a canal or road beneath elevated ground. In mining the term is also sometimes applied to horizontal excavations. Tunnels are more common in Europe upon railways and canals than in this country. In the United States the total length of tunnels is not more than one mile for every thousand miles of road. In Great Britain it is considered cheaper to tunnel through rocks than to make open cuts deeper than sixty feet. In England the Wood-head Tunnel exceeds three miles in length; and there is another on the London and North-western Railway nearly three miles long. Twelve or fifteen others on different roads exceed one mile each. The Box Tunnel on the Great Western Railway, between Bath and Chippenham, is thirty-one hundred and twenty-three yards long, or rather more than one and three fourth miles.

On the canals of England there are five tunnels exceeding three thousand yards in length. The longest of these is the Marsden Tunnel, fifty-five hundred yards long. In France there is one tunnel on the St. Quentin Canal over thirteen thousand yards long.

Some of the tunnels of the ancient Romans were quite extensive in their character. One which was constructed by the Emperor Claudius was cleared out some years since by the Italian government. It proved to be about three miles long, thirty feet high, and twenty-eight feet wide at the entrance, and was nowhere less than twenty feet high.

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.

Most of the tunnels in America are on the lines crossing the Alleghany Mountains. There is one tunnel on the Penn

494

TUNNELS IN AMERICA.

sylvania 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 day. time 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

INCIDENT IN BERGEN TUNNEL.

495

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.

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."

These utterances seemed to be more a matter of form than anything else, as the kissing went on like a company of infantry engaged in file-firing. You would have imagined that a whole flock of school-girls had met another flock of schoolgirls, from whom they had been separated at least six months. By and by the train came out of the tunnel.

The gentleman recovered his hat and pretended to be reading his newspaper; he had it upside down, and it was torn. half through. The lady's book was open at about the first page, though she had been reading it for three hours. Her hair had been loosened, and was falling down. Her lace collar was disordered, and quite in keeping with the collar of her masculine friend, one side of which was turned up like the toe of an old boot, while his neck-tie had lost its trim knot,. and its ends were dangling like a pair of fish lines over the side of a ship. The gentleman and lady were very red in the

496

AN UNHAPPY FRENCHMAN.

face, and somewhat exhausted, and altogether they looked like a pair of butterflies that had been run through a sausage

machine.

A story is told of a Frenchman travelling in a railway coach in England, who was very anxious to change his shirt in order to make a visit after the train had arrived, without taking the trouble to go to a hotel. His guide-book indicated a tunnel on the road, and he asked the guard or conductor how long the train would be in the tunnel. The guard mistook his question, and supposed he asked how long before the train would reach the tunnel. He answered briefly," Half an hour."

The coach in which the Frenchman was travelling was filled with ladies and gentlemen. The traveller got down his valise, unlocked it, and made everything ready for a change of apparel while they were in the tunnel. As soon as they entered it he pulled off his shirt, and prepared to put on a clean one; but imagine his surprise, and that of his companions, on discovering that the train remained only three minutes in the tunnel, instead of thirty. As they came out in open daylight he was standing in their midst in a condition quite unfit for a mixed company of ladies and gentlemen.

The longest railway tunnel in the United States, is the Hoosac Tunnel, in Massachusetts. Its total length is twentyfour thousand five hundred feet, or more than four and one-half miles. Its width is eighteen feet, and its depth fourteen feet. As long ago as 1825, the Hoosac Tunnel route was surveyed. and a legislative commission was appointed to investigate the practicability of building a canal from Boston to the Hudson River. They made their report, in which they recommended a tunnel through the mountain.

In 1828 another commission reported to the legislature of Massachusetts that they could get over the mountain with a railway more quickly and more cheaply than through it, and recommended the Boston and Albany line, which was opened for travel in 1842.

From Boston to the Hudson River the route by way of the