The Snow Sheds: Engineering a Railroad Through Winter

The transcontinental railroad opened in eighteen sixty-nine. Within the first few winters, the Central Pacific had a problem. The Sierra Nevada was closing their tracks.

Snow on the summit could reach depths the equipment of the eighteen sixties could not clear. Avalanches were destroying track. Storms that lasted a week at a time shut down operations entirely. The railroad that was supposed to connect the continent was being interrupted by the same mountain range the Chinese workers had spent years drilling through.

The solution was to build a roof over the railroad. Beginning in eighteen sixty-nine, crews began constructing wooden snow sheds over the tracks from Emigrant Gap to the Nevada state line, a span of approximately forty miles. The sheds are essentially covered corridors: wooden structures with sloped roofs designed to shed avalanche debris and accumulate snow on top rather than on the tracks. They are among the longest continuous covered railroad structures ever built.

You can see sections of the sheds from Interstate Eighty if you know where to look. The structures have been rebuilt and reinforced many times since eighteen sixty-nine. The railroad is still running inside some of them. The same freight that moved on this route in the eighteen seventies still moves on this route today, through wooden and steel tunnels over a granite summit that the Sierra Nevada winter has been trying to close for a hundred and fifty years.

The mountain has not stopped trying.