Donner Pass and the snowsheds that have faded away

I can remember as a child reading about this place. The Southern Pacific’s Donner Pass crossing of the Sierras in northern California near the Nevada line held almost mythical qualities — dazzling cliffs, deep tunnels, miles of snow sheds. In the 1960s, it was the land of scarlet and gray F units, funky German hydraulics, and growing ranks of six-axle diesels. This was the Southern Pacific’s mightiest mountain crossing, where the ghosts of 256 Cab forward 4-8-8-2s, the last of which ran some 60 years ago, lingered.

So, when a recent trip to California provided me with a morning and early afternoon with which to enjoy what is now Union Pacific’s Donner Pass, I jumped in my rental car in Sacramento and headed east. With our all-time Donner Pass map (from February 2015) in hand, I drove to Colfax, where an eastbound stack train was climbing the grade at a leisurely pace. Track work, the summer chore of every mountain railroad susceptible to snow in the winter, was underway, and even stacks out of Oakland are not immune. From Colfax, I followed the train to Norden, certainly one of the sacred spots of railroading in North America. It was where snow and railroading came to fight each winter, with one winning more than the other. Here, the original grade and the existing grade diverged, and the old grade today is nothing more than ballast strewn on the ground. A woman and her dog made good use of the route that Southern Pacific took up in 1993. What was once a scene of snowsheds is today just another curve on the railroad with a small remnant of the sheds left.

Amtrak’s westbound California Zephyr and track work conspired to hold the stack train just around the corner from Norden, and it gave a following grain train time to catch up later. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was standing on the spot where I’d seen so many images, including the black and white below from 1981 that was made by Ronald N. Johnson. . It hasn’t been that many years since the snowsheds practically lined this place for miles on end. They’re still abundant, but the sheds at Norden are just a memory over the main line.

Later, over a teriyaki and Swiss burger with fries and a Coke at the The Summit restaurant, I contemplated what I’d just seen. As a child, Richard Steinheimer images in Trains February 1966 issue introduced me to the vision of F units darting in and out of the snowsheds, and on this day, I had returned to the same place to witness their descendants working against gravity. As I finished my lunch the whine of dynamic brakes holding back a westbound stack train snapped me from my trance, but nothing will take away from the experience of being on Donner Pass in 2016.