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BREAKNECK RAILROAD TUNNEL
Drilling at Breakneck mountain's western base at riverside had met with a particularly vast, inflexible core of granite. When work had begun in March, 1847, on the first 53 miles of laying track from 32nd St. in New York City to Breakneck mountain, chief engineer, John B. Jarvis, marvelled how stubbornly difficult was penetration of rock at Breakneck. Workmen, drilling all day, could bore no more than two feet into the mountain's anatomy. Having commenced work from the outset at 32nd St., numerous contractors chose quitting the undertaking when faced with Breakneck's maddening, and costly, resistance. Not until mid 1848 was the final of several previous contracts offered to yet another engineering contractor. It would be another seventeen gruelling months, however, before a "breakthrough" of the extraordinarily persistent mountain would come to pass.
Taming Breakneck had not been achieved without danger. Aside from injurious falls, machine-induced harm, caveins, and the like, most haunting was the daily threat of nitro glycerine. "Nitro" was extremely risky business, and its necessary presence had to be treated respectably and with deliberate caution. Midst all the innumerable foibles concerned with the railway painfully inching its way through Breakneck, none would prove more glaringly dangerous than the imposition of nitro to blast away massive tonnage of ancient rock. Dynamite wouldn't be invented until 1866 by Sweden's Alfred B. Nobel of Nobel Peace Prize renown. A far saner, more controllable explosive dynamite would prove to be, but to the drillers and detonators at Breakneck in 1848-'49 (had they known of dynamite being invented) would have thought 1866 to be a million years away!
This laying of the first railway line for the recently organized "Hudson River Railroad" would entail, among other considerations, an exceptionally challenging feat of engineering. The track line, which would eventually reach Albany in 1851, and would border the river at water level along much of the entire route, would have to be laid, where necessary, over creeks, inlets and causeways indenting the Hudson's shoreline. Trestles, where feasible, would be constructed over various open water areas. Foundations too, built below water level, may have come into play in support of tracking passing over such watery expanses. Singularly, or in combination, such processes of overcoming tracking hindrances had been prefaced with a realization of the potential for a wider scope of engineering perplexities down the road.
Aside from the myriad of complexities of laying track in Philipstown's Cold Spring (the Constitution Island split, tracking over Foundry Cove, and railway land-fill along today's Market St.) none, it can be imagined, would quite equal the perilous and uncertain environment while drilling, chiseling and blasting one's way through the cavernous countenance of an unsurrendering mountain. Such was Putnam County's Breakneck.
And the anxious dawn, awaiting entry at the other end of the railroad tunnel, would be ecstatically cheered by those who had struggled valiantly in bringing about the daylight. Doubtless, the ancient precipice wanted no part of the celebration.
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