NEPM’s Carrie Healy recently stood at about 1,900 feet above sea level in Florida, Massachusetts, on a mountain in the Hoosac Range. Nearby is the central shaft. It now provides ventilation to the Hoosac Tunnel through a central shaft. The Hoosac Tunnel was, until 1916, the longest tunnel in North America. It opened up the northern Berkshires to trade and tourism, creating an essential rail connection to other regions, despite political battles, financial mismanagement and the tragic death of workers. To learn more about the tunnel, which is marking 150 years since it saw its first passenger rail excursion, we turn to rail historian and author Carl Byron.
Carrie Healy, NEPM: In 1851, when excavation first began on the Hoosac Tunnel, which is somewhere beneath us, what did engineers understand about the makeup of the mountain that they were boring through?
Carl Byron, historian: Absolutely nothing! It was an absolute guess. No borings were taken. The state geologist, his name was [Edward] Hitchcock, basically took a guess, and it turned out a great deal of it was absolutely wrong. In 1851 a couple of shovels full of dirt were moved in North Adams, but nothing was actually done on the site of the mountain until March of 1853, when they tried the boring machine at East End, which worked very well for ten feet and then quit.
And there were complications on the West End as well.
Oh, there were serious complications on the West End because the material was anything but stable. And the only way it was conquered (beginning in 1865) was they built a brick tube 26ft in diameter, approximately 3 to 4 feet thick, with 6 to 8 or 10 layers of brick, and pushed that into the mountain for about 2500 feet. And for the next 5000 feet they had a brick arch to hold the unstable earth away. Two brickyards were built at the west end of the tunnel, and they laid over 20 million bricks.
So, lacking modern conveniences for surveying, how were the engineers on this project able to ensure that workers could excavate from both the east portal and the west portal, and then be more than pretty likely that they would meet up where they'd hoped to?
Well, that produces an interesting scenario, because the original contractor, Herman Haupt, was going to meet up by basically drilling from each end in at an angle. So somewhere along a line in the middle of the mountain, they were going to meet with a slight curve.
The engineer that replaced him, Thomas Doane from Charlestown, he realigned the survey. He moved the west portal up into the north, and he also built towers. And it was just plain hand surveying and a lot of pencils. And he did it. And they met head on as they were supposed to, not quite as accurately, it appears, as commonly believed, but they did meet within 4 or 5 inches, head to head and unnoticeable amount vertically.
This undertaking of tunneling was massive and it was dangerous, and it required huge numbers of men. Some workers died in explosions from falling rock and other accidents involving ladders and scaffolding. The central shaft where we are. It plunges more than 1000ft down into the mountain and was the site of a tragedy on October 17th, 1867. Can you recall that story?
Well, clearly, the central shaft has an interesting background because it was written into the original specifications for the tunnel as a ventilation shaft, which was absolutely necessary. But those who were opposed to the building of the tunnel were more than delighted to have it built in, because they didn't think it could be done. And such would kill the project. And they were almost right.
The shaft was down to about 580 some odd feet, and the new contractor was fooling around with something called a gasometer, which basically used gasoline fumes for illumination. And as we wouldn't be surprised these days, it caught on fire, and everything went down into the shaft. There were 13 unlucky men at the bottom, and they were either impaled with drills or killed with falling timber. Some of them ultimately asphyxiated because all the carbon monoxide and smoke went down the shaft.
Among all the men involved in this project, from politicians in Boston to local rail advocates and engineers, is there any one individual that you see as absolutely critical to getting the Hoosac Tunnel built?
Without Crocker, they would not have been a tunnel. Alva Crocker started with building the Fitchburg Railroad, or getting a charter for it in 1842, and having it opened in 1845. He then led the charge with Vermont and Massachusetts, to get to Greenfield and the Troy and Greenfield, through the mountain, through the tunnel to North Adams, Williamstown. And fellow promoters in Vermont and in New York built a line from that end.
How much did it ultimately cost to tunnel the nearly five miles through the Hoosac Range?
That's like asking the current generation how much Boston's Big Dig cost. It depends on who you talk to. The original proposed cost by Hitchcock in 1850, something…
Before this got started and underway.
…was something like A $7,000, and it came out in the end at pushing $20 million. You compare the percentages! It's not that much different between the original cost for the Big Dig in Boston and the final cost for the Big Dig in Boston.
Did the tunnel achieve the goals of the men who advocated for it, and who fought for all those years?
It did, and it didn't. The tunnel has carried millions of tons of freight and hundreds of thousands of passengers. But at the time the tunnel was conceived in 1850, the West was what we call today the middle West. By the time the tunnel was completed, the transcontinental railroad had been completed, so the middle West was pretty well solidly being settled. And there were other railroad routes to it.
So, the tunnel got its reasonable and fair share of the transportation needs, but it was not quite as glorious and successful as Alvah Crocker would have hoped.
Carl R. Byron wrote ‘A Pinprick of Light: The Troy and Greenfield Railroad and its Hoosac Tunnel’ among other titles.