A friend of mine asked me a question from a friend of his concerning a tunnel in Holliston, MA. According to his friend, it is not a very tall hill that was tunneled through when the line was in operation in the 1840's. The line was abandoned when the tunnel size became too small (?) This line is in the gun sights of the rails to trails folks.

The questions are:

1. What is known about this tunnel and line?

2. What were the deciding factors for tunneling or cutting (economics, technology, etc.) if the cutting could have seemingly been done just as easy?

Thanks,
Ray

I don't know anything about this specific line or tunnel, but the Museum of Transportation has a tunnel that was built in the early 1850s and the technology was the same. The Pacific RR of Missouri (later MP) built two single track tunnels through two ridges at our location because the with the methods of the time it would have been far more expensive and would have taken a lot longer to build a cut in the same locations. One of the tunnels was shortened in the late 1920s, but they weren't replaced with the present double track cuts until the war-time traffic of 1944 justified this move. Black powder and manual labor was used to build tunnels in the early 1800s and to build a cut would have called for the removal of many times the quantity of rock with these rather primitive methods. During the construction period the line would have been trying to minimize costs until traffic and revenue could be built up, a process that sometimes took years.


Museum of Transportation
rdgoldfede@aol.com