The railroad tunnels high above Truckee hold historic stories. Deep in the granite, the lives of immigrant workers were made and lost over 150 years ago in an attempt to build the longest railroad tunnel at the time. 

But those stories are now at risk of fading out of public consciousness and succumbing to vandalism. The situation has spurred a grassroots organization to push for a National Historic Landmark designation for the tunnels near Donner Pass with the hope of preserving some of the history that remains. 

The tunnels trace back to the 1860s, when thousands of Chinese laborers worked to achieve a monumental feat in the High Sierras, boring a tunnel through 1,659 feet of some of the hardest granite in the world, using hand drills and back powder, through two of the snowiest winters on record. 

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At the risk of death by explosion and avalanche, builders of the Transcontinental Railroad’s Tunnel 6 — the Summit Tunnel — made possible the rugged Sierra stretch of the line, which in turn helped grow the country into an international powerhouse when it was completed in 1869. 

“(The tunnels are) really an important space for American history, but for Chinese Americans, it’s almost sacred space,” said Ted Gong, Executive Director of the 1882 Foundation, which is leading the push for the landmark designation. “Two thousand Chinese lost their lives building the railroad.” 

Alongside the construction prowess, the tunnel also embodies a period of American history following the Civil War when racism fueled numerous acts of violence against Chinese people. 

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In 1882, less than 13 years after the Transcontinental’s completion, Congress instituted a 10-year ban on Chinese laborers immigrating to the United States through the Chinese Exclusion Act — the first federal law to target a specific ethnic group. It extended the act in 1892 and then made it permanent in 1902, codifying a national pandemic of sinophobia that had given rise to organized violence against Chinese immigrants during the late 1800s. 

This violence included arsons, lynchings and the so-called “Truckee Method,” where real and threatened violence, applied incessantly, drove Chinese people out of the small California railroad town. 

“(The tunnels are) really an important space for American history, but for Chinese Americans, it’s almost sacred space,” said Ted Gong, Executive Director of the 1882 Foundation, which is leading the push for the landmark designation. “Two thousand Chinese lost their lives building the railroad.” 

Gong worries that that sacredness now risks fading out of memory, with very real consequences to the historic site. 

Graffiti at the Tunnels 

Railroad historian Phil Sexton, who leads educational tours at the tunnels near the pass, noticed an uptick in graffiti at the site around 2018. Tags — graffiti signatures — first started appearing on the exteriors of the more modern snow sheds and avalanche walls. But as time went by, the tagging migrated inside the tunnels, onto the historic rock surfaces, sometimes hundreds of feet deep within the tunnels. 

Once paint covers the tunnel surfaces, their history is irrevocably damaged. Chemical paint remover destroys the 150-year-old patina. Sandblasting simply exposes a new surface of rock, obliterating the surface the workers actually worked on. 

“To me, that’s just criminal,” said Sexton, who finds value even in the layers of smoke embedded in the tunnel ceilings. “There’s particles from every locomotive that’s ever passed through those tunnels. It’s these layers and layers and layers of history that profoundly changed our nation.” 

He recalled asking one tagger, who was drawing something resembling Chinese characters at the site, if he knew what words he was writing. The tagger said, “No man, it just looks Asian.” 

Sexton continued, “It’s not so much graffiti any more as it is vandalism. A lot of it is obscene, some of it’s political, a lot of it is just nonsense.” 

Short of a regular law-enforcement patrol, currently made prohibitive by cost and jurisdictional issues, Sexton and the 1882 Foundation hope that increased education will instill enough respect in the public to curtail further damage. 

“I think the answer to that is if we can get this national landmark established and have a presence up there, people doing guiding and other things, we can help discourage some of that inappropriate use by just being on site,” he continued. 

The designation, Gong added, would open up the area to federal funding for a possible interpretive center or program with on-site docents. 

The federal recognition would also begin to establish a source of truth for the area’s history, dispelling the myths, such as those of Chinese laborers hanging from wicker baskets, that have crept into popular folklore. 

Land Ownership Concerns 

But the tunnel itself, although detracked in 1993 and surrounded by public lands, remains the private property of the Union Pacific Railroad. And UP, while eager to honor the history of railroad workers, remains reluctant to officially open up the tunnel for public use. 

On top of the liability concerns that come with a long, dark tunnel high in the mountains, UP continues to use the tunnel for crew access, equipment staging, and as an emergency route, said UP representative Margaret Ronspies. 

“Union Pacific stands ready to engage with the Department of Interior to discuss our interests and learn more about the NHL designation to ensure it does not restrict our operations,” she continued. “We will want to ensure an NHL designation does not conflict with those critical needs.” 

But designation or not, visitor traffic to the site is increasing, said Sexton. Whether driven by popular media, such as AMC’s “Hell on Wheels” television series and the BBC’s “Great American Railroad Journeys”, or the collateral attractions of hiking, climbing and skiing nearby, avoiding the landmark designation and avoiding visitor liabilities are not the same thing. 

“There’s thousands of people and dozens of groups that just go in there figuring, it’s open public land,” said Sexton. “They’re trespassing, but they’re also putting the railroad at increased liability.” 

A Chinese Landmark 

This December will mark the 80th anniversary of the rescission of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Although the Department of the Interior places the landmark-application decision sometime in mid-2024, Gong still hopes to tie the two together. 

“These things are still relevant because one of the fundamental ideas is Asians, like us, are aliens; we’re not a part of this place,” said Gong, referring to recent Asian hate crimes in Oakland and general pandemic-inspired sinophobia nationwide. “National monuments reflect national values, the historical things that built and contributed to the nation. … That place, for us, is the Summit Tunnel.” 

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in the Winter 2023 edition of Tahoe Magazine.