ABOVE: A southbound UP manifest train navigates the dark shadows between Tunnel 11 and Tunnel 10 on September 12, 2012. Rattlesnakes are common at Palouse Falls (RIGHT), although they don’t want any more to do with you than you do with them. Expect to find them in brush, or in shady rock crevasses on hot summer days. Marmots are common all along the railroad (FAR RIGHT) and have long since gotten used to trains making the earth shake.


chemicals, so it makes good seawalls and rip rap or other containment structures. When crushed into gravel, it has been employed as a road-building material or railroad ballast. Less helpfully, basalt rock formations have necessitated miles of cuts, fills and slide fences, as well as no small number of tunnels. Basalt also provides a foundation for most of the Columbia and Snake River dams.


Carved In Rock Five closely spaced tunnels are among


the more notable features of the Union Pacific line along the rim of the Palouse Falls canyon. All were completed at the same time, in 1914, along with all the cuts and fills, plus the Joso Bridge, but the engineers and construction crews created something for the ages. There have been very few modifications


50 NOVEMBER 2015 • RAILFAN.COM


during the last hundred years, although the bridge is a little closer to the river surface now, after the water level rose behind Lower Monumental Dam. The dam is one of four big hydro dams on the Snake, which also opened the river to barge navigation as far upstream as Lewiston, Idaho. Unfortunately, this had a devastating impact on the spider web of grain branches in the Palouse region of Idaho and Washington, most of which are now gone. Would they have disappeared anyway? We’ll never know. We can only guess how the surveyors reacted when they first beheld this area, but it must have been far from obvious where the railroad would ultimately go. There is no natural route. Since 2009, or perhaps even earlier,


big yellow SD9043ACs were almost the only Union Pacific diesels used


on freights at Palouse Falls. Then, in early 2013, the long-bodied haulers abruptly disappeared. Rumor had it that they had all gone to storage somewhere in California, on account of a manufacturing defect, perhaps in the frame. In any event, the canyon trackage doesn’t seem the same without them. But we’ll get over it. On the Ayer Sub, we’re overjoyed to see any train, with any diesel leading the way.


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