Chinese Workers Cut This Donner Pass Tunnel by Hand in 1867. Now Anyone Can Walk Inside

Tunnel 6 sits behind a wooden gate beside Donner Pass Road, 7,000 feet up in California's Sierra Nevada. No sign, no lights, no staff — just 1,659 feet of hand-cut granite that anyone can walk into. For 125 years, it was the most important tunnel in the American West. In the 1860s the Central Pacific Railroad had to get the transcontinental railroad through the granite spine of Donner Summit, a few miles from where the Donner Party was trapped in 1846. About 12,000 of its 15,000 workers were Chinese laborers. With hand drills, black powder, and later nitroglycerin, they attacked the tunnel from four faces at once — including a shaft sunk from the mountaintop, worked by a stripped locomotive hauled up as a hoist. When the crews finally met inside the mountain, their bores lined up within about two inches. Trains ran through Tunnel 6 from 1868 until 1993, through blizzards, snow sheds, and the 1952 stranding of the City of San Francisco. Then Southern Pacific moved everything to the cheaper Mount Judah line, pulled up the rails, and walked away. ⏱ CHAPTERS 00:00 A gate beside Donner Pass Road 01:16 Why the name is a warning 02:04 Theodore Judah's survey 03:05 12,000 Chinese workers 03:58 How hand drilling worked 04:40 Nitroglycerin on the mountain 05:16 The shaft and the locomotive hoist 06:20 Missing by two inches 06:59 Breakthrough and the golden spike 07:34 Forty miles of snow sheds 08:44 1952: the City of San Francisco trapped 09:26 125 years of trains 10:16 Why it stopped 11:20 The Judah twist 12:04 Five crossings stacked on one summit 12:46 Inside Tunnel 6 today 13:21 Why it will never reopen 📍 LOCATIONS Tunnel 6 (Summit Tunnel) — east portal beside Donner Pass Road, Donner Summit, CA. Unlit inside: bring a flashlight. Ice forms in winter. China Wall — dry-stacked granite retaining wall built by Chinese crews, near the east portal Donner Memorial State Park — Truckee, CA Dead Grade investigates the roads, rails, and tunnels America built — and the day it stopped using them. Subscribe for the next forgotten place like this one. #DonnerPass #TranscontinentalRailroad #AbandonedTunnel