ctclibby
Well-Known Member
Ya, used to be the longest tunnel in the Western Hemisphere. Mt McDonald (sp?) tunnel at Rogers Pass came in something like 300 ft longer.This the longest tunnel on American network. It's not even close to Swiss tunnels in length, but at almost 8 miles still very long. You can stand at the West Portal right on the track and see the headlight of a train for 20 minutes before it will get close. All you will hear is just a distant deep rumble. This tunnel was also electrified long time ago. Worlds largest in size, single unit electrics used to run through here; Great Northern W1 class. Too bad they went backwards and de electrified this line. Now it's sort of a bottle neck because it takes sometimes half hour to blow out the diesel smoke out if it. The infrastructure that you see on the picture is actually the fan system for blowing out the fumes.
The thing about the Cascade Tunnel is if you stand just at the right spot at the West Portal, you can see the other end. Well, if the door is open. It is uphill all the way to about 200ft before the East Portal then the alignment heads down toward Berne ( and points east). When a train comes in Westbound from Berne, it is like the sun rising.
I happened to be at the West Portal for the 1st train West after the 2nd fan was installed. You could see it come in, then after about 10 minutes, the headlight disappeared. Apparently that 2nd fan blew all the smoke past the whole train. Scanner had the train crew really bitching. They did have O2 masks onboard. So when the ventilation was turned on was changed and ran at half power while a West bound was in the bore. So there still is about a 20 minute wait Eastbound for the tunnel to clear. Westbound can pretty much run one train after another, block signals depending.
I y'all are going through Cascade Pass, both East and West portals are worth planning for. Google map it to find those access roads.
Later