History
The Western Pacific Railroad (now part of the Union Pacific Railroad) built the tracks along the Feather River in 1909 to complete the Feather River Route, a San Francisco Bay Area - Salt Lake City route competing with the Southern Pacific's route over Donner Pass.
While significantly longer, the Feather River Route was preferred by some over the Donner Pass route (elevation about 7,000 ft / 2,134 m) over the Sierra Nevada mountains, because the former's summit under Beckwourth Pass is at a lower elevation (about 5,000 feet / 1,524 m) and most of the route follows a gentler grade along the Feather River.
The tunnel was designated one of Plumas County's "7 Wonders of the Railroad World," and the north portal is 0.15 miles west on Railroad Street, then 0.35 miles SSE along a fair-condition dirt road from Spring Garden, California.
Read more about this topic: Spring Garden Tunnel
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Regarding History as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been victimized—the question involuntarily arises—to what principle, to what final aim these enormous sacrifices have been offered.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“the future is simply nothing at all. Nothing has happened to the present by becoming past except that fresh slices of existence have been added to the total history of the world. The past is thus as real as the present.”
—Charlie Dunbar Broad (1887–1971)