Unless you are a train enthusiast, you may not know about the Tehachapi Loop. In order to gain elevation, they engineered this loop to spiral over itself (in a tunnel) in such a way as to keep the grade around 2% and still get the the point they needed to in order to get through the pass. It took 3000 Chinese immigrant workers less than 2 years to complete using mainly manual labor in the late 1800s.
It’s very difficult to describe and would probably be easier with an aerial photo. In the shots we took, the train began to the far upper right, took a turn to the left to come up a tunnel in the middle of the picture and snake around and over the tunnel and then into another tunnel in the hill to our right. We just caught the end of the first train and the second train just had empty cars, so it is not as easy to see. Click the below photo to enlarge. The engine of the train was beginning to enter the second tunnel and the tail was still coming through the first one. 🙂
This was pretty amazing to see and even though the photos don’t do it justice, all the images are here.
