Engineering Wonders of the World
Volume I

THE CANADIAN PACIFIC RAILWAY. 275 Disastrous Careless- ness. hole and jammed some five or six feet above the powder that was already there. The weight of a long, thin tamping-stick proved quite insufficient to dis- lodge it, so, with unusual lack of caution, a steel drill was tried, and, of course, a spark was struck. “ After the explosion, and while the torn bodies of the victims were being carried away, a silence fell upon that army of civilization. It is said that corpses never float in the cold waters of those mountain rivers. Certainly in this case, of those which must have been en- gulfed none appeared on the surface again. Neither dynamite nor drags raised them, and after a little while, when that cut had been finished and left behind, the memory of the occurrence faded. “ Amusing incidents there were too. One day a badly rattled old mule backed over the edge of the dump, cart and all, with a startled bray of dismay, into the river below. There he sat, still harnessed to the submerged cart, just his nose and eyes out of the water, and was rescued only by the united efforts of a score of men with a stout rope. “ Railhead, from which place all supplies had to be freighted in sleighs, was anything but an imposing or populous place ; but, as being the connecting link between civilization and the wilderness, it merited the sigh of relief which greeted its appearance round a bend of the trail. “During the winter, human and other feet had beaten a hard narrow path in the snow, so that, although the snow itself was quite seven feet deep, the continual building up of the path pre- vented the real depth from being apparent until a mis- step sent one floundering up to one’s shoulders. The path itself led through primeval forests of huge cedars, which, as their A Comic Escape. The Mountains in Winter. spreading roots and rough churn butts were bedded deep in the even coverlet of snow, rose straight and majestic until lost in the green of their interlaced and sweeping branches. Not a breath of wind could stir in that close forest, and not a living thing showed itself, so that the screech, of an occasional ‘ whisky- jack,’ or the chatter of a woodpecker testing a dead branch which seemed likely to harbour food, gained altogether undue importance, impressing still deeper on the imagination the succeeding absolute stillness.” All rock tunnelling is slow, laborious, and terribly expensive, but some of the tunnels on the path of the C.P.R. were of a peculiarly hazardous and dangerous char- acter. The bed of solid rock Tunnel- ling. which required blasting was overlaid in places with a stratum of exceed- ingly tenacious blue clay, the clay again being covered by gravel. Every foot of tunnelling had to be timbered up as it was driven, in order to prevent the caving-in of the clay, which would inevitably have occurred had it been left for ever so short a time without support. The winter temperature on this section of the road varied from a few degrees above to about 50° below zero. “ It will be easily understood,” says Mr. Cunningham, the con- tractor’s engineer, “with such a low tempera- ture as this, how much difficulty may be caused by ice piling in the rivers about bridge piers, by springs that force their way out of the sides of cuttings and tunnels, freezing as they flow, and by accumulations of ice that form on the mountain side till they fall of their own weight.” A steam sawmill was erected on the margin of Kicking Horse Lake to cut up the timber into piles, ties, bridge and trestle timber. Here also was erected a dynamite factory, to obviate the dangers of transporting high ex- plosives from long distances east by rail. More than 90 tons of dynamite were made at this