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Drilling for trains

Jefferson Park, North 20th and East Marshall Streets

This is our drama for the week. It even made NPR! Some individuals decided that it would be cool to dig up the work train, and maybe find some incidental corpses, buried in the collapse of the Church Hill tunnel back in 1925. Here they are, drilling a hole to stick a camera down. According to the newspaper, they've struck water. They say they'll pump the water out and try again with the camera. If it's a lot of water, I don't know. There's always water oozing out the wall sealing the western end of the tunnel. Oozing out the upper part of the seal, I might add. I am not a civil engineer, but I wonder if removing the water will maybe destabilize the tunnel. The water is exerting outward pressure on the walls, the walls press back against it. If you remove the water, will the walls cave in?

The earth around the tunnel is rather unstable, hence the catastrophic cave-in and C&O Railroad giving up on the tunnel. Jefferson Park, which is over the tunnel and the train, is also one of the areas which slumped in Tropical Storm Gaston back in 2004. Even though they say the park will be stabilized as part of the train extraction project, I wonder. Opening up a hole in the hill big enough to get a train out through will probably be dangerous and invite quite a lot of instability. As it is, they've peeled back the turf which holds that part of the hill in place, just in time for the summer erosion season.

Here in the neighborhood, there are a lot of different opinions on whether this is a good idea and what to do with the train. Should it be displayed at the Historical Society? Should they put it in the park? I particularly like the suggestion of a glass-walled building set into the hillside so we can see the train in situ (like an ant farm of a disaster), but that sounds really expensive and impractical, given the propensity of the hillside to collapse.

I think the excavation of the train is a bad idea. First of all, a doomed train buried in the ground beneath our feet is simply more interesting to me than a doomed train at the Historical Society. Of course, if I had a dead relative under the hill with the train I might feel differently about getting the bodies out, but I don't. Second, Marshall Street, and maybe Cedar Street, would probably be closed for however long the project took. A year? That would be really inconvenient. Third, I wonder whether the risks and cost (supposedly the funding will not be coming from the city, so this costs me, personally, nothing) are really worth the benefit, especially since I see no benefit to the neighborhood in having our mystery removed. So that's my opinion.

Also, pretty pictures, since I was wandering around with the camera anyway: the whimsical gate of Tricycle Gardens, a community organic gardening project which is pouring flowers out through its fence. I walked up to 25th and M to shoot the restored Bromo Seltzer walldog, but I think I like this picture from a few weeks ago better. I spoke with the owner (?) of the building. He's putting in a Cuban restaurant. When I stepped inside to look around, they were even playing Buena Vista Social Club on the stereo. The interior looks really nice. I hope the food is good.