Rensselaer Republican, Volume 18, Number 4, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 October 1885 — A WONDERFUL TUNNEL. [ARTICLE]

A WONDERFUL TUNNEL.

Eight Thousand Perspiring Miners—Drilling a Huge Hole Through Twenty-eight Miles of Solid Rack. Deep down under the rustling cornfields, green meadows, and peaceful woods by the faint yellow light of innumerable smoky lamps, and the intermittent cold gleaming from white electric lights, 6,000 grimy men are toiling night and day so that the watersupply ot New York may f flow through twenty-eight miles of solid rock. It never ceases, this grinding, and cranking, and whirring, and dull booming <sf powder explosions, save for two hours out of the twenty-four, when 3,009 men drowsily crawl out of the dim shafts on the Surface of the. earth to eat their meat and bread, and go to sleep, while 3,000 other men take their places. Since the first of the year these cold, trickling caverns and shafts hdve been drilled and blasted continuously. Hundreds of powerful steam-drills, driven by streams of compressed air from wonderful, shining engines, eat into hard rock like so many steel parasites, and mountains of torn gneiss and shining mica have been piled up around the shafts as the work went on. In two years from next September a tunnel of thirty-one miles will stretch from Croton Lake to the reservoir in Central Park, through the brick and stone lining of which will gush a body of crystal water more than enough tb supply the metropolis plenteously. For all these blessings, and the proud distinction of owning tjrb longest rock tunnel in the world, the city will have to pay at least $33,000,000, or perhaps $60,000,000. The Mount Cenis tunnel is seven and one half miles long, and cost about $15,090,000, while the St. Gothard tunnel is nine and one quarter miles long, and cost very little more. F6w people in the city have any idea of the marvelous rapidity with which the aqueduct tunnel is being made. Indeed, the speed which is kept up has attracted the attention of miners all over the country, for nothing even approaching to it has ever been seen before. The work is divided into two parts. From High Bridge to Terrytown, it is in the hands of O’Brien & Clark, the contractors, and from thence to Croton Lake it belongs to Brown, Howard & Co. These contractors farm out the tunnling to sub-contractors. On the whole there are twenty-six shafts. These shafts are bunched up into sections of two or three shafts each, and the sub-contract-ors are under agreement to tunnel out the rock in their respective sections at so much a yard, and to build the brick and stone waterway inside of it at set prices. Over 8,000 men are employed in the work—6,ooo underground and 2,000 on the surface. At the bottom of each shaft the miners work in two directions, so that while one set of men are drilling southward, there is a set of men in another shaft working northward to meet them. These shafts are about a mile apart, and yet so delicate and accurate are the plans of the engineers that in no case, they declare, will the line of the tunnel be more than an inch out of the way when the miners in the different tunnels meet each other underground. The reporter put on a rubber suit and descended the shaft with Engineer Parker. Water rained down the rocky walls from all sides until it poured from the rubber hats. Then, picking his way over little pools of water and huge, scattered masses of rock, the engineer led the reporter along the tunnel southward- Electric lights were hung from the roof of the cavern all along the way, but even they could not dispel the thick gloom that dwells in the damp place. Here and there were little lights suspended in line by wires from the roof,so that the foremen might sight from one to the other, and so keep drilling out the tunnel in a straight course. At the end of the cavern was a crowd of men working at,, “slugger” drills, which emitted such a terrific sound that the hearing became dulled, and the sledge-hammer blows which a brawny miner showered upon a handdrill sounded like the strokes of a velvet hammer upon a featherbed. Perspiration poured down the faces of the men as they hung to the drills or poured cups of water down the drill holes to keep the dust from blinding them. Each drilling-machine emitted such powerful snorts of cold air that at times they created a strong breeze, which swept away the smoke curling up from the oil lamps on the miners’ hats. “There, you see our method of working," said Mr. Parker. “The upper half of the tunnel is drilled before the lower half. It is called the heading. The lower half is called the bench. First, two holes are drilled in the heading from the side of the tunnel. The holes slant inward toward each other, so that when the powder put in them is fired a wedge is blown out of the heading. The holes are drilled straight along the sides, and the remainder of the rock, forming the wedge-like cavity, is blasted out. When the heading is tunneled out twenty or thirty feet a gang of men drill holes straight down into the lower half, or bench, and clear that out. The heading is always fifteen feet ahead of the bench. When the holes are charged with powder the men carry the electric lights fb the shaft, and go up to the surface themselves. The charges are fired by electricity from the surface, and the explosions are sometimes so powerful as to twist up the iron tracks laid in the bottom of the tunnel. After the explosion a gang of men called muckers go down and remove the wreck. The men at the drills have nothing to do with this work.”