Stoney Creek and Rogers Pass
Hi Roy:
Great screenies of Rogers Pass. As a tourist on a passenger train it would be wonderful to go over Rogers Pass instead of going under the pass in a long tunnel. However there are really good reasons why the two tunnels were built. More for the History buffs :hehe:
"The fact that the western hemisphere’s longest railway tunnel pierces through British Columbia’s Mount Macdonald is mostly due to the dogged determination of a scrawny but crusty American major. Major A. B. Rogers got his title in the 1862 Sioux uprisings in the United States. He got his engineering degree at Brown University and then went on to Yale. He got his practical experience surveying the Milwaukee Road. And he got his reputation by swearing like a sailor and eating like a bird. He wasn’t a mountain man. He lived and worked on the American Prairies. And yet CPR commissioned him to survey a shorter route through the Rockies and Selkirks. And, CPR hoped, he would find a pass through the Selkirks.
Major Rogers pored over Walter Moberly’s accounts. Moberly discovered Eagle Pass in the Gold Range in 1865. Albert Perry, Moberly’s assistant, found the beginning of a pass from the Columbia River up the Illecillewaet River. So Major Rogers rediscovered it, in 1881, and went further upriver. He confirmed there was a pass. But it was only half a pass. True to form, Rogers ran out of food. He went back the way he came, looped around the Selkirks through the United States and finished surveying a line through the Rockies. He settled on the Kicking Horse Pass. CPR head office, with Rogers’ assurance of a pass through the Selkirks, decided on a more southerly route for its main line...... in 1882, Rogers set out to find his pass from the east. After a false start, again due to a lack of food, he found the other half of his pass through the Selkirks in July.
And what did Major Rogers get for his trouble?
CPR named the pass after him — Rogers Pass. CPR also gave him a $5000 bonus. But he didn’t cash the cheque. Instead he framed it and hung it on the wall at his brother’s house for his nieces and nephews to see. So then he got another reward. CPR’s William Van Horne enticed him with a suitably engraved gold watch — if only he would cash the darned cheque! So Rogers cashed the cheque, picked up his princely sum, and a fine gold pocket watch in the bargain!
The line was built through Rogers Pass in 1885. It looped back and forth along the sides of mountains, crossing creeks and ravines on massive wooden trestles, and passing under no fewer than 31 snowsheds. But the most horrendous cost came in lives. In the first 30 years, when trains went through the pass instead of under it, more than 200 people lost their lives. Mostly from avalanches."
And that is why the tunnels were built.
Thanks Roy for your tip on OpenGL for screenies. From now on for sure
The Canadian is now going over the Stoney Creek bridge. To most of you it might be just another bridge but I have a good reason for this screenie.
On our Rocky Mountaineer trip last August I took the following photo up Stoney Creek while we were having lunch on the train.
And turning around in the same location we all spotted this small forest fire on the far hillside to the east.
Once again I find is kind of "spooky" that we took that trip and now get to "relive" it in Roy's World :udrool:
Cheers,
Derek
I trust that you have much more modern facilities nowadays.
):
