The following is a great video that goes into great detail about the work to restore the largest rock wall at the Palisades on the way to Alpine Tunnel.
The narrator is Marcus Trusty, founder of CORE (Colorado Off Road Enterprise), a motorized advocacy group. He along with many others has played an important role in seeing the 2016 avalanche damage to the rock wall repaired.
You will see great shots of the wall, of the work, and especially of rock scaling where you can see boulders come crashing down.
At one point Trusty dialogues with one of the stone masons. They discuss artifacts found during the work. Not much was unearthed, but the workers did find some spikes, a piece of rail, and "a train brake." Apparently these were taken to "the Pitkin guard station" to be put on display "up there." Not sure if he meant on display in Pitkin or at the Alpine Tunnel station. They also found "a lot of little nails and dynamite crates."
They also discuss the process of splitting rocks and how the workers today did it very similarly to the construction workers of the 1880s. They surmise that one of the original sources of rock when the railroad was built is at the present intersection of Williams Pass and the railroad grade just above the large rock wall.
One interesting fact was that Williams Pass was never graded very well because it was only intended as a temporary road for construction of the railroad. Is this accurate? Trusty commented that Hancock Pass, on the other hand, was a more regularly used road.
It was encouraging to learn from the video that work was also done to repair some of the other several walls along this stretch in addition to the famous large one.
Some have asked about the issue of drainage with the restoration and their work on that is also discussed.
The narrator estimates that the entire project, that required many different partners, came to about a million dollars.
Later Marcus Trusty goes into great detail about all the various groups and grants that made this work possible. It is almost hard to follow it all, but it is a reminder of just how many organizations and individuals it has taken to make this work happen. It should be sobering to realize that railfans and historical groups could not have pulled this off alone. We are indebted to the many non-railfan groups that finally made this 8-year-project come together.
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