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About The west shore. (Portland, Or.) 1875-1891 | View Entire Issue (Sept. 1, 1887)
THE WEST SHORE nificant, compared with the achieve ment of modern time. They show what can bo accomplished by the des Iotic ruler of millions of people, with the stolon wealth of nations at his com mand; a ruler who counh the lives of his subjects as nothing when weighed against his slights whim. They do not, however, keep pace with the grand march of scienco in this nineteenth cen tury. Could theso ancient builders re-visit tho earth from that realm to which their spirits have fled, and behold the mighty achievements of our present age, they would bo rendered speechless with an astonishment bordering upon awe. The mighty steamship, plowing the ocean at raco-horso speed; tho telegraph, flash ing intelligence around the world with tho rapidity of thought; the telephone, carrying articulato speech instantly to distances farther than many of them ever traveled; tho electric light, dispell ing tho darkness like a mid-night sun; tho printing press, disseminating knowl odgo among tho masses; tho railroad, uniting, with bands of stool, countries of which they never dreamed; great en gines and substances of deduction, ca pable of razing to tho ground in a brief Ioriod tho mightiest structure their hands ever reared; theso seven only, of tho multitude of tho products of scienco which h avo become so common to us that wo cease even to think of them, would bo clawed by them as tho M seven miracles of tho world," bolide which their "iwven wombra" would sink into noth ingneK. Of tho achievements of modern sci ence, tho feats of railroad engineering rank among the firet Tho traveler of to day is carried through tunnels that pierce tho rocky br-arU of mountains, is sus pended at dizzy heights a!ove deep gorg.n and turbulent rivers, on trestles and bridge, threads tho mountain maz es on a sinuous trail, clings to the face of precipices upon a narrow shelf blast ed from the solid rock, and crosses the summits of mountain ranges at altitudes bordering upon the region of perpetual snow. But let him j:urney from one end of the continent to the other, he can not find such another piece of eccentric railroading as that which he will experi ence in crossing the Cascade mountains by the famous switchback on the North ern Pacific. When the Northern Pacific finally se lected its route across the Cascade moun tains by the Stampede pass, the engi neers, in order to save a long and tortu ous line across the mountains, expensive to construct and operate, located a tun nel, nine thousand eight hundred and fifty feet long, through the heart of the highest peak in the pass, at a level of eleven hundred feet below the lowest point on the summit The estimated time necessary to complete the tunnel was two and one-half years, more than a year longer than was required for the construction of the road. The company was very anxious to es tablish tho route across the Cascades as speedily as possible, and so referred the question of a line over the summit to Adna Anderson, chief engineer. The problem was to overcome an elevation of eleven hundred feet in less than two miles, the length of the tunnel The en gineer reported he could carry the line over tho mountain on the "switchback" principle, by building seven miles of track, about one-half on each side of tho summit, with an average grade of near ly three hundred feet, and at a cost of 500,000.00. Tho original cost of con struction, provided the plan was adopt ed, did not by any means represent the exponso incurred. Tho purchase of lo comotives of enormous power, and the expense of operating such a line, where but a few cars could be handled at a