Another one bites the light

[NW Mailing List]

I don't think they mean daylighting the tunnel. I think they mean that 
hen raiseing the roof of a tunnel when you start seeing light at then 
end it means you are almost to the end of the tunnel. Therefore almost done.

Nathan Simmons
trainman51 at gmail.com
http://www.t-51.org
KI4MSK



NW Mailing List wrote:

> Anybody making last chance photos at Coopers and the other tunnels 

> being daylighted? See attached article from BD Telegraph below:

> Jim Cochran

>

> *Light at the end of the tunnel:*

>

> *By Bill Archer*

> Bluefield Daily Telegraph

>

> COOPERS — When the workers laboring to raise the roof of the old 

> Cooper Tunnel on the Norfolk Southern mainline in Mercer County see 

> daylight, it’s about time to call it a day.

>

> NS is on the home stretch of the Heartland Corridor project that 

> started in the fall of 2007 and is on track to be finished later this 

> summer. When it’s done, the Heartland Corridor will enable NS to move 

> double-stacked freight cars from Lambert’s Point (near Hampton Roads, 

> Va.) on the Atlantic coast all the way to Chicago on the Lake Michigan 

> shore.

>

> “When people ask, I tell them we’re clear in Virginia as far as 

> Belcher Bridge in Bluefield,” James N. Carter Jr., PE, chief 

> engineer/bridges and structures with NS said. “When they ask me when 

> it will be done, I tell them August.”

>

> Carter, 57, is an old-school railroader who was born in Piedmont, near 

> Mullens when his father, a Virginian Railway locomotive engineer, was 

> serving in the Korean War with the U.S. Army. After the Virginian 

> merged with the Norfolk & Western Railway in 1959, the family moved 

> from Mullens to Bluefield, where the senior Mr. Carter worked with the 

> N&W. The family picked out a home on the Virginia side so young Jim 

> could pursue his lifelong dream of attending Virginia Tech. “As an 

> in-state student,” Carter said.

>

> Each structure — tunnel, low bridge or narrow cut — along the 1,200 

> mile-plus long Heartland Corridor has its own set of challenges. 

> Before crews with LRL Construction of Tillamook, Ore., started work, 

> Carter had to hammer out the details of the project with his brother 

> NS railroaders. Both mainline tracks needed to be shut down for a 

> while, but with as many as 18 trains moving through Bluefield over a 

> 12-hour period, Gary Shepard, superintendent of NS’s Pocahontas 

> Division headquartered in Bluefield would have his hands full.

>

> “The hardest thing about doing a job like this is having to run trains 

> every day on one of the busiest sections in the NS system,” Carter 

> said. “I worked at the coal load-out in Lambert’s Point for 15 years, 

> so I know how important it is. I wanted as much uninterrupted time as 

> possible to work on the structures, so the transportation planning 

> people worked with people on the coal traffic side and we figured it out.

>

> “Gary asked me: ‘Does it make any difference if you work in the day or 

> night?’ I told him it’s always dark in the tunnel, so it didn’t 

> matter,” Carter said. “They close the track down from 2 a.m., until 

> noon every day. We get a section done, clean everything up and get 

> back to it when we go in the next day.” Since coal traffic is 

> traditionally heavier late in the week, the Cooper Tunnel crew works 

> Saturday through Wednesday.

>

> Initial construction of the Cooper Tunnel was a significant moment in 

> the history of the N&W Railway’s development of the McDowell County 

> coalfields. Keystones at both ends of the tunnel bear a 1902 date, but 

> the start of the tunnel triggered the development of the vast 

> metallurgical coalfields in McDowell County. Pioneer coal baron Jenkin 

> Jones was in the first wave of McDowell County coal developers, but 

> Samuel A. Crozer, John J. Lincoln, L.E. Tierney and others soon 

> ignited the McDowell County coal boom of the early 20th Century.

>

> The crews who built the Cooper Tunnel in the late 19th and early 20th 

> centuries built it to last. The 680-foot long tunnel has a huge void 

> above the roof that appears on maps to extend more than two-thirds the 

> length of the structure. The void is listed at as much as 18 feet on 

> some of the maps, but Bill Hawk, an inspector with Jacobs Associates 

> laughed and hinted that the charts may not be entirely accurate.

>

> The roof of the old tunnel was lined courses of bricks set in mortar, 

> topped with another 4-foot layer of concrete. “Some huge rocks fell on 

> the top in that void over the years, but didn’t come through,” Carter 

> said.

>

> “They originally had wood stacked up in there,” Jared Beeler, 

> superintendent on the tunnel job for LRL said.

>

> “One place up in there, we found lead buckets that they used to carry 

> grout up there,” Mike Downs of LRL said. “They built this back when 

> men were men.” The LRL crews donated the lead grout buckets and some 

> other artifacts to Bramwell Mayor Louise Stoker to display at the 

> Bramwell Depot.

>

> Carter said crews are replacing the arched brick roof with curved 

> steel I-beams, topping them with 48-inches of concrete and moving the 

> top up from its former 19’6” to a new height of 20’3”. After 

> everything is in place, workers will top the steel interior of the 

> roof with shot-crete.

>

> In addition to the Cooper Tunnel, crews are also working on the Big 

> Sandy 1, 2, and 3 tunnels. When the project is completed, crews will 

> have completed expansion of five miles in total length of 28 tunnels. 

> Crews lowered the track in five of the tunnels, but all the rest 

> involved raising the roof.

>

> Safety is a priority on the job site. So far, one contractor died as a 

> result of injuries received on the project. Larry Dale Hunt, 28, of 

> McDowell County died Oct. 22, 2009, while excavating broken concrete 

> at Tunnel #3 near Gray Eagle. NS Spokesman Robin Chapman said that 

> approximately 160 ton of materials fell on the excavator Hunt was 

> operating. Hunt was working for Johnson Western Gunite.

>

> When the project is finished, it will cut the mileage double-stacked 

> trains travel from Hampton Roads to Chicago by about 1,000 miles.

>

> ------------------------------------------------------------------------

>

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