Gundyville On Wheels: Light at the End of the Tunnel

Marilyn wanted to make a side trip, from our base in Anchorage, down to Portage and then over to Whittier. It wasn’t so much the destination that was calling to her as it was the trip itself, which involves traveling though North America’s longest highway/railroad tunnel, which runs dead straight through the mountain and under the glaciers for 2.5 miles. That girl just loves tunnels and caves. Me? I just don’t! So by my standards, that’s a long tunnel. Too long. But she’s the navigator and I’m just driving the bus (so to speak) so off we went. Yes, the tunnel is long. It’s also very dark. They have electric lighting in there, but if you were to turn off your headlights (as the list of rules clearly states you should not) it would be way too dark both for comfort and driving. It was even too dark for my taste WITH the headlights on. The tunnel is also only one lane wide. That single lane must be shared by vehicular travel east to west, west to east, and by a train that goes both ways. To accomplish this feat, a schedule is published telling which traffic will be traveling in which direction and when. The time blocks are in 15 minute allotments. Picture yourself driving along, instead of across, a railroad crossing and you will get the basic idea. Then plunge yourself into the dark to the extent that you know the bare granite sides of the tunnel are there, you just can’t see exactly where. Going through the tunnel at the wrong time in the wrong direction is simply not a good idea. I am hoping others read the schedule exactly as I do.
The whole way through, Marilyn kept saying, “Isn’t this cool?” I answered with, “Isn’t this dark?” But finally I could see the light at the end of the tunnel. “Light at the end of the tunnel” - an expression we freely use to refer to the end of a journey, be it through life, a traumatic time, an illness we are recuperating from that has taken way too long, or just a real tunnel. But when is light at the end of the tunnel NOT such a good thing? The answer is clearly this: when the light at the end of the tunnel is attached to a train that is about to enter the same one way, single lane tunnel I am traveling in the opposite direction! So well before we actually made it to the end of the tunnel, we both could clearly make out that was the case. We could also discern that the train was moving and moving forward and about to enter the tunnel. What schedule told us that would happen??? A video recorded, speed enforced limit of 25mph is the rule, but once we could see what was happening, I stepped that up by more than a little bit. Got out of the end of the tunnel and swerved left into my outside lane just as the train zipped by us and into the tunnel. Whew!
I was the last car through the tunnel in that time block in that direction. Later, I was assured that the train engineer knew “I’ll be coming around the mountain when I come, toot, toot,” but I was taking no chances. Shop owners recounted similar happenings to them, including one day when they shut the steel entrances to the tunnel while one of the shopkeepers was still trying to make it out. But all’s well that ends well, and the tunnel ended safely in both directions…and I’m happy about that. Got a decent story to boot! Toot Toot!
You can take a “virtual drive” through the tunnel by clicking on this link. Your virtual drive will be much better lighted than mine was!