This video posted on NGDiscussion.net blew my mind, here is a link to the thread and video:

http://ngdiscussion.net/phorum/read.php?1,395896

I don't know what's more impressive the trestle or the job filling it in!

Great video. Amazing the amount of work performed and how labor intensive it was.

Several things impressed me. First is the geometric perfection of the trestle itself. It almost looks knit. The horses were no doubt fed, watered, and bedded more comfortably than the workers. The rigging, in lifting the NG carts is awful. Link and pin couplers on the NG equipment. Anybody recognize the piano accompaniment? It's beautiful.

Very interesting video, and interesting topic.

The RCT&HS had a very cool magazine the other year about how the Reading Railroad filled in a few large high trestles on the Catawissa Branch. It was such a fascinating article, detailing the problems that they encountered, such as when the metal trestle started to deform after a certain amount of fill! I recall that they ended up having to encase some of the metal in concrete to prevent the deformity.

I found a related article to that here in a google book.
https://books.google.com/books?id=M78cA ... ll&f=false

Sadly, the Catawissa Branch was abandoned immediately after Conrail took over the Reading Railroad.

When I was a kid in the sixties, the family took a camping trip to Colorado, and my Dad decided to drive Gold Camp Road from Colorado Springs to Cripple Creek. This road was built on the ROW of the Cripple Creek Short Line, the railroad that went around the "other" side of the mountain. Partway through the day long trip we came to a place where the road had been relocated and the highway dept. was mining gravel from a high (and narrow) fill on the former ROW. Interestingly the original timber trestle was emerging as the fill was removed. About forty feet tall, the trestle bents were still in excellent condition after having been buried for over fifty years.

For those interested, the trestle and fill are located here:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/51%C2 ... 19.3206565

As was noted in the uploader's comments, this is on the Vancouver-bound segment of CN's transcontinental mainline, which currently sees well over 20 trains a day.

There is a good article on that fill here: http://www.exporail.org/can_rail/Canadi ... 3_1989.pdf

The article answers many questions about the movie, but the movie also answers a question posed in the article about how the fill was topped off. The footage at the end showing multiple gauge tracks - two 3 feet and standard gauge on the top of the trestle is pretty neat, whereas the article guesses standard gauge cars were used at the end.

Bob

Great article! Awesome that one of the locomotives from that job is still around today.

A photo of the trestle while under construction:

https://www.bclocalnews.com/news/north- ... -the-past/

Christmas 2019.

#25 was one of several Vulcan 0-4-0Ts built for Grant, Smith & Co. and used on improvements to the Great Northern between Leavenworth and Skykomish, WA.

Another fill job: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEuL1D- ... mb_rel_end