How Workers Roofed 40 Miles of Sierra Nevada Railroad to Stop Avalanches

In the winter of 1866, the Sierra Nevada buried the Central Pacific Railroad under 44 feet of snow and killed workers whose names the company never recorded — and the solution they built to stop it from happening again was the longest continuous wooden structure in American history.

This video tells the story of how the Central Pacific Railroad roofed 40 miles of Sierra Nevada track against avalanche using 65 million board feet of timber, a workforce of 2,000 Chinese laborers, and two construction seasons under the direction of bridge superintendent Arthur Brown and construction superintendent James Harvey Strobridge. We cover the engineering of the snow shed system — how the bents were designed, why the roof pitch varied by avalanche zone, and how the structure carried up to 36,000 pounds per linear foot of wet spring snowpack without collapsing. We go into the labor economics, the payroll records from the Stanford Chinese Railroad Workers Project, the operating conditions inside the sheds, and what happened when Pacific storms tested the design to its limits in the winters that followed. The men who built those 37 miles of timber roofing are almost entirely unnamed in the surviving record. This video is about what they built and what it cost them.

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Sounds or visuals were altered or fully generated.