How Americans Buried a Railroad Under Thirty-Seven Miles of Wood

In the winter of 1866, forty-four storms buried the Sierra Nevada, and a single snow slide took an entire railroad camp. Within three years, the Central Pacific answered by putting 37 miles of its own track under a wooden roof. This film tells how that roof was built and what it took to keep it standing. It starts with the Chinese crews who lived in tunnels under the snow while they cut the summit tunnel through granite, then follows the timber galleries built so avalanches would slide right over the trains, with 65 million feet of 12-by-14-inch timbers and 900 tons of iron. It climbs up to the fire lookout on Red Mountain and the fire trains that waited with steam up day and night, follows the 1889 fire at Cascade that left a mile and a half of track open and the blizzard of 1890 that trapped eight passenger trains, and ends with the cab-forward locomotives built to escape the smoke and the streamliner City of San Francisco, snowbound in 1952. They called it railroading in a barn, and for almost a hundred years it kept a railroad open over the Sierra. Did anyone in your family work on the Southern Pacific over Donner Pass or ride through the old snow sheds? Tell me in the comments. #RailroadHistory #DonnerPass #SnowSheds #CentralPacific #TranscontinentalRailroad #SierraNevada #AmericanHistory #HistoryDocumentary