http://www.localnewsdaily.com/news/story.php?story_id=115631203563748500
http://www.localnewsdaily.com/news/story.php?story_id=115631203563748500
Daylight at tunnel’s end
Oneonta Tunnel to reopen as part of Historic Highway restoration
By Sharon Nesbit
The Gresham Outlook 19.2 hours ago
Last week daylight beamed through the Oneonta Tunnel for the first time
since 1948.
The tunnel, just east of Multnomah Falls, was built in 1913 as part of
the Columbia River Highway. Plugged with rubble in 1948 when it became
too narrow for modern-day traffic, the tunnel and the bridge leading up
to it – called “the bridge to nowhere” – are being reclaimed as part of
the restoration of the Historic Columbia River Highway.
When the $1 million project is done next June, visitors to the popular
Oneonta Gorge will park in a new area east of the site, enjoy a walk
through the timbered tunnel and enter a plaza at the mouth of Oneonta
Creek Gorge much like the one that Sam Lancaster designed when he
created the scenic roadway.
Seeing the first daylight through Oneonta last week was a big thrill for
Gresham resident Dave Sell, who spent four years guiding the project
before his retirement from the Federal Highway Administration. It takes
a ton of paper work before you get to see the light at the end of the
tunnel.
Sell, a photo and postcard collector, is a highway fan and wrote an
article on the historic highway for the autumn 2005 edition of “American
Road.”
Sell and Jerry Lairson, project inspector from the Oregon Department of
Transportation, are like kids at a birthday party as workers from Oregon
City’s PCR Construction open the historic package.
The only treasure, so far, said Lairson, was an old rusty can bearing
two sets of letters, KER and in another spot, ATE.
Lairson took it back to ODOT offices where workers played a kind of
“Wheel of Fortune” game and came up with a possible solution, Quaker
State (as in the motor oil). Workers also are finding telephone line
conduit that was placed in the tunnel years ago.
The restored tunnel will be reinforced with long metal rods, steel
plates, a layer of shotcrete and finally, a timbered lining of Western
Red Cedar. The Oneonta Gorge Creek bridge is being reinforced with fiber
beams. At its west end is an old staircase that leads down to the creek,
a popular hiking/wading trip in late summer.
The new parking lot and plaza also will solve safety issues, Sell said.
Previously, visitors parked near the west end of the tunnel and pulled
back onto the highway on a blind curve.
The original historic highway boasted four tunnels. Restoration opened
the Mosier twin tunnels to bicycle and occasional historic vehicle
traffic in 2000. Oneonta is third on the list and a replica of the
fabled Mitchell Point windowed tunnel, destroyed during freeway
construction, is a gleam in planners’ eyes.
The Historic Columbia River Highway was the first scenic highway in the
United States. Officially opened July 6, 1915, it was considered a
marvel of highway engineering but was quickly outdated as cars and
trucks became bigger and traveled at higher speeds.
In 1948 when Oneonta Tunnel was closed, the railway line was moved to
the north to allow the highway to curve around the basalt cliff at the
mouth of Oneonta Gorge.
Construction of the water-level, four-lane highway up the Columbia Gorge
beginning in 1949 left two long driveable sections of the scenic road,
one from Troutdale to Ainsworth and the other east of Mosier.
Other abandoned sections of the highway have since been reclaimed for
bicycle and hiking use, and highway buffs would like to see the
remaining segments of the road linked by its 100th birthday in 2016.
/end
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Fundies and trolls are cordially invited to
shove a wooden cross up their arses and rotate
at a high rate of speed. I trust you'll
be 'blessed' with a plethora of splinters.
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