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Updated: July 22, 2025
But I never told the push that I held down the decks the whole night, clear across the Sierras, through snow-sheds and tunnels, and down to Truckee on the other side, where I arrived at seven in the morning. Such a thing was disgraceful, and I'd have been a common laughing-stock. This is the first time I have confessed the truth about that first ride over the hill.
I find there are two kinds of snow-sheds, one sort used on the plains, with pointed roofs, from which the snow slides down on either side, thereby preventing the blocking of the line; the other, used along the mountain-sides, sloping over the track, so as to carry the snow-shoots clear over it down into the valley below. I soon turned in again, wrapped myself up, and slept soundly for some hours.
It issued a rate of forty-two dollars a car on charcoal. At the end of three months, Jones went over his figures, and found that he was still making one dollar and sixty cents a day. "So I quit," Jones concluded. "I went hobbling for a year, and I got back at the railroads. Leaving out the little things, I came across the Sierras in the summer and touched a match to the snow-sheds.
As he left the first line of snow-sheds he heard a whistle echoing somewhere among the ice and rocks, and at the same time the gong in his cab sounded and he applied the brakes. The conductor ran up and asked, "What did you stop for?" "Why did you signal to stop?" "I gave no signal.
The pause was so long that Gallagher took his chance of filling it. "Don't be tellin' me the big boss has promised us a rotary for next winter, Misther Foord. That'd be too good to be thrue, I'm thinking." "No; but next winter you'll be doing one of two things, Michael. You will be pulling your train through steel snow-sheds on Plug Mountain or you'll be working for another boss.
Our share, however, was one of the safest, for it consisted in hewing logs out of the forest for framing the spidery trestles and snow-sheds, hauling sawn lumber into position, and doing general teamster's work. Risks there were of course the rush of a charging boulder, or a sudden descent of shale, while occasionally a partly grubbed out trunk came thundering down before it was expected to.
"The status," she continued, gravely, "should remain, I think, the same." The directors' party had been inspecting the Camp Pilot mines. The train was riding the crest of the pass when the sun set, and in the east long stretches of snow-sheds were vanishing In the shadows of the valley. Glover, engaged with Mr. Brock, Judge Saltzer, and Bucks, had been forward all day, among the directors.
The next morning finds me briskly trundling through the great, gloomy snow-sheds that extend with but few breaks for the next forty miles. When I emerge from them on the other end I shall be over the summit and well down the eastern slope of the mountains.
The snow-sheds are very peculiar; they are built out over the line with sloping roofs, so that when the avalanches of snow and stones and ice come flying down as the grip of winter relaxes, they are carried off right over any train that may happen to be passing, and thunder on into the valley below.
I have not started out on this greatest of all bicycle tours without looking into these difficulties, and I remind them that the long snow-sheds of the Central Pacific Railway make it possible for one to cross over, no matter how deep the snow may lie on the ground outside.
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