From Vancouver we headed east to the town of Hope. The only reason for us to visit Hope was the Othello Tunnels. We'll get to them at the proper time in the story.
Like all good railroad stories in the 19th Century, the backstory of the Kettle Valley Railway is full of politics, money, personal animosity and a few good people busting their butts to make dreams reality. For our purposes we'll begin with the discovery of silver in the Southern Interior of British Columbia in 1887, a mere two years after the completion of the first Trans-Canada railroad.
Because of the proximity of the region to the U.S. (Hope is less than 50 km from the U.S. border), thousands of Americans poured north. The Americans took control of the area, essentially turning it into a "commercial annex of the United States." The American miners found it was easier and cheaper to get supplies via the recently completed U.S. railroad, Northern Pacific which was part of the Great Northern Railroad. That was just fine with the Great Northern president, James J. Hill, who had a long-standing personal and professional feud with Canadian Pacific president William Van Horne.
"Provincial and Federal officials quickly agreed that a second railroad dubbed the "Coast-to-Kootenay" railroad within British Columbia was required in order to help preserve Canadian sovereignty of British Columbia, and to also retain the valuable mining revenues within Canada." (Wikipedia)
It was from this need that the Kettle Valley Railway was ultimately born. One subdivision of the proposed railway ran through the Coquihalla River Valley. It was a more challenging but more direct route than the northern route.
(I wish I could credit the source of this map; I found the map but not it's source. i apologize.) The part of this map we are most concerned with is the lower left hand corner, the Coquihalla Subdivision.
For most of the 36 -mile climb from near sea level at Hope (138 feet) to the Coquihalla Summit (3,646 feet) the line ran over a 2.2% grade. But four miles out of Hope the engineers ran into this:
the Coquihalla Canyon with sheer vertical granite walls soaring 300 feet above the turbulent river.
McCulloch and his crew were lowered down the cliff faces in woven baskets. They carved foot-holds in the rock and from this precarious position set up their surveying instruments. Using only manpower, horse-drawn scrapers and blasting powder, McCulloch's men created a route through the canyon. Instead of a single mile-long tunnel the road threaded its way on only a third of a mile of track.
When It was completed, this was the most expensive mile of railroad in the world, costing over $300,000 to build. That's nearly $6 million in today's dollars. It was also a very expensive route to maintain. It is said this part of the road was shut down more than it was open in the first seven winters.
For nearly 50 years the Coquihalla line provided freight and passenger service between the Southern Interior and the coast at Vancouver. Better roads and air travel siphoned off both passengers and cargo. In 1959 heavy rains washed out a section of the Coquihalla and it was never repaired. The line was officially abandoned in 1961.
Most of the former Kettle Valley right-of-way, including the Coquilhalla line and the Othello Tunnels, is now an extensive multi-use rails-to-trails system
You can see more photos of the Coquihalla Canyon and the tunnels on our Flickr page.
Oh, why "Othello" tunnels? engineer Andrew McCulloch loved Shakespeare. He used to read and recite from Shakespeare's works in the construction camps. He named towns all up and down the Coquihalla line with Shakespeare names: Juliet, Lear, Iago, Romeo.
I wish my father could have seen this. He would have loved it.
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