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:
“The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“The history of all countries shows that the working class exclusively by its own effort is able to develop only trade-union consciousness.”
—Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)