In the eighteen fifties, tunneling often used timbered vertical shafts from which workers were lowered in buckets to blast horizontally, while others blasted sideways from both portals, but chief engineer Claudius Crozet judged shafts impractical for the Blue Ridge Tunnel because the passage would lie seven hundred feet below the mountaintop and the expense of digging shafts that deep would not speed the work before crews from the sides reached the center. Although newspapers blamed delayed completion on the lack of shafts, construction was slowed instead by the unavoidable limits of fickle gunpowder, manual drilling, and manual debris removal, since the project came decades before stable dynamite, drilling machines, and motor-driven muck cars. Crozet also confronted water in the tunnel, which he had doubted would be a problem in eighteen forty-nine but by eighteen fifty-three called suddenly very troublesome; he built a siphon of connected cast iron pipes, said to be two thousand feet long though later measured in nineteen eleven at one thousand seven hundred ninety-two feet, and it eventually removed two-thirds of the water at sixty gallons a minute while a horse-powered pump cleared the rest. When seasoned timber could not be obtained for the South River Bridge in Waynesboro, Crozet turned to an iron bridge designed by Wendel Bollman, fabricated at Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond, and in place by eighteen fifty-three. He also anticipated trouble from smoke after blasting, and after studying an English ventilation device, he had machinists build and maintain a version that by eighteen fifty-three provided a constant supply of fresh air to the workers.

Photo: Cosmos Mariner

Photo: Anonymous

Photo: Anonymous

Photo: Anonymous

Photo: Cosmos Mariner

Afton, Virginia · USA