Re: East Portal of Alpine Tunnel & Romley bridge 1992 video

Here is a shot of the tunnel ceiling, somewhere toward the middle, but we really had no idea how far in we were. Don't know what those straps between timbers were for, aside from the legend of a lantern hung at the middle of the tunnel to alert crews to the top of the hill. I don't think hanging one up there would be very useful though, between being blasted by the exhaust of laboring engines, and the general difficulty of getting the lamp down to service it. Seems it would have made more sense to hang them on both sides about cab window height.


This was as far as we could go. This cave in, compared to the photos in Poor's books, appears different, as I'm sure it had caved in further toward the west entrance since those early photos were taken.


We attempted to recreate the long photo from Poor's book, but the good camera's lens, unfortunately, and unbeknown to us at the time, had fogged over in the damp interior, so all the photos taken with that camera were unusable. The other thing that surprised, and appalled us, was the amount of rail missing inside the tunnel. LOTS of little pieces gone. People were really determined to haul off pieces of it.

Kent