11 August 2009
One of Many Extreme Challenges
Construction of a snow shed on the CPR at Glacier Park, British
Columbia, in 1887 - William McFarlane Notman - McCord Museum N-0000.25.1060
Here, author Graeme Pole recounts one of the many stories
of extreme engineering told in his two books.
"They built the track through Roger's Pass and it was finished in 1885, but they knew it would get bombed by snow the following
winter. So, William Cornelious Van Horne, the manager of the Canadian Pacific Railway, positioned three survey engineers in Roger's
Pass that winter... to report on what kind of snow shed work might be required to protect the tracks.
They came back with mind boggling statistics of individual places being buried 39 times by avalanches and stuff like that.
Van Horne wanted the railway open for business in the spring of 1886, because they'd spent so much money and they hadn't made a nickel
yet. So, these guys report back that... it's going to cost $1,126,034 to build 54 snow sheds that would cover more than 5 miles of
track in and near Roger's Pass. And 31 of those sheds were to be between Bear Creek and Ross Peak, and the longest snow shed would be
3,130 feet long.
That amount of money represented about one percent of what it had already cost the Railway to complete the entire railway in
Canada... it was a staggering thing to drop on the lap of the boss when he wanted to start making money!
But they built the sheds: it took them two winters to get them all in operation... A phenomenal amount of wood went into
building those structures. And it was all milled on site by means that, today, we would consider quite primitive. And yet some of
those structures... parts of them still exist today. They're still in the woods there in Rogers Pass... they were well built
things: if they didn't get destroyed by an avalanche, then they've stood there for more than a
century".
Interior of a snow shed - Date/photographer
unknown.
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