The California Zephyr

On July 1, 1862, while Confederate and Union troops shredded one another with minie balls and grapeshot in the hills around Richmond, Virginia, Abraham Lincoln made time to sign the Pacific Railroad Act. Less than eight years later, on May 10, 1869, Leland Stanford drove the Golden Spike at Promontory Point, Utah, thereby completing construction of the Transcontinental Railroad.

Talk about effort!

Jane and I rode the western portion of that stupendous effort the other day on the California Zephyr, Amtrak’s three-nighter from Oakland to Chicago. It humbles you to rumble along in the observation car munching crackers and sipping whiskey over the very roadbed and through the very tunnels that 10,000 mostly Chinese laborers hacked into the Sierra Nevada Mountains fifteen decades ago. The Central Pacific surveyors somehow charted a route with a 2% grade through terrain which the pioneers had navigated scant years earlier by lowering their Conestoga wagons down the cliffs with ropes. The laborers accomplished their task with picks, shovels, wheelbarrows, and mules, trenching notches through inconvenient hills and filling inconvenient gorges with the spoils. The bigger gorges they spanned with spindly A-frame trestles fashioned from lumber harvested nearby.

And tunnels! They blasted eleven tunnels through the granite peaks, seven of them in a two-mile stretch at Donner Summit. They fed five hundred 25-pound kegs of black powder to the tunnel faces every day, where shifts of crews worked round the clock to accomplish one foot of progress in every 24 hours. So they blasted toward the middle from both ends and, at the summit’s Long Tunnel, also sank a shaft into the center point from above, and from that pit blasted away in both directions. The tunnelers linked up eventually there in the heart of the mountain itself with an error of two inches.

Don’t ask how many men lost their lives to premature blasts and cave-ins.

Meantime teams of oxen hauled disassembled locomotives and miles of track over cart trails through Donner Summit and down to Truckee such that construction crews could race away eastward alongside the Truckee River while the tunnelers inched along behind them.

The supply chain for this undertaking initiated in East Coast foundries and factories whence locomotives, cars, rails, switches, and equipment of every description loaded onto sailing ships for the 200-day journey around Cape Horn to San Francisco, then up the Sacramento River to the railhead, then by freshly-laid rail and oxcart to the ever-advancing construction site.

The owners of the Central Pacific Railroad were two hardware merchants, a dry goods merchant, and a grocer — the so-called Big Four — Leland Stanford, Collins Huntington, Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker. With the fortunes they accumulated, the Big Four founded a university, a bank, and several swanky hotels atop San Francisco’s Nob Hill.

The federal government sweetened their kitty by ceding them 6,400 acres of trackside land for every mile of track (the total acreage thus granted for the entire transcontinental railway exceeded the size of Texas) and by paying them outright for every mile of track laid — $16,000/mile in flatlands; $32,000/mile in foothills; $48,000/mile in mountains. To their exceptional drive and organizational skills, the Big Four added a measure of guile. They persuaded the Feds that the Sierra Nevada Mountains began at Arcade Creek, eight miles east of Sacramento. The other day we rode for an hour past Arcade Creek through fruited plains and rolling foothills before commencing the long and very sinuous pull up to Donner Summit. Just before entering the long summit tunnel at Norden we passed beneath the ski lift at Sugar Bowl and envied the wintry athletes swaying peak-ward above us. Mother Nature freighted the Sierras with white stuff this winter; every pine’s branches sagged under a burden of snow.

Sadly, the California Zephyr, and all of Amtrak’s long run trains, the City of New Orleans among them, sing the Disappearing Railway Blues these days. Each of those nostalgic continental anachronisms loses gozillions of dollars annually. After the skiers and gamblers de-trained at Truckee and Reno the other night, we proceeded across the Great Basin with a manifest of twenty paying passengers, fewer patrons than crew members. The California Zephyr, The Coast Starlight, The Broadway Limited, The Empire Builder, all of them . . . doomed.

Book now. Something will stir inside you as you rock into slumberland in your sleeper room, listening to the heart-piercing wail from your locomotive at every grade crossing.

Waaaah. Waaaah waaaah.