The Odd Instance of Four Tunnels Under a Railway

Good engineering demands foresight. On the former Columbia and Western (C&W) Railway across southern British Columbia, that principle was applied though not always with perfect success. Over fifty-one years, four successive tunnels were driven beneath the same railway embankment to carry water and road traffic. This unusual sequence forms our subject.

The C&W, later absorbed by the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR), ran 126.6 miles (203.7 km) west from Nelson to Midway over what railway men called “the Farron Hill,” part of the Monashee Mountains and officially CPR’s Boundary Subdivision. Some today mistakenly fold it into the Kettle Valley Railway, to which it connected at Midway, but the C&W possessed a separate lineage.