Tunnel

I was recently working on a LIDAR survey in Whittier Alaska that had me driving through the Anton Anderson Memorial Whittier access Tunnel. It's the second longest road tunnel in the U.S. after the Ted Williams tunnel in Boston. It's about 2 1/2 miles long. It hasn't always been a road tunnel, just a train tunnel since it was built in the early 1940's but converted over to a train/road tunnel a few years back.
Driving through the tunnel had me reminiscing about a survey I worked on back in 1984. We were surveying the Right-Of-Way for the Alaska Railroad back then and surveying through the tunnel with conventional gear was quite an experience. We ignited road flares and used them for our foresights and backsights as we traversed on through.
The right-of-way was 200 feet wide, 100 feet each side of center. We positioned and set the monuments of the right-of-way on top of Maynard Mountain that the tunnel passed through.
I wasn't much of a photographer back then and only have a couple snap shots from that project. Here is one of them here shooting into the sun on top of the mountain where we were setting one of the monuments.

The pilot who flew us around that day was Roger Hershner. Roger was a great guy and had a hell of a story. Back in the seventies he landed his helo in the exercise yard of Santa Marta Acatitla prison in Mexico to breakout a convicted murderer, Joel Kaplan. Joel was an American and the operation was financed by his dad, a millionaire in the states. It was the first recorded prison break using a helicopter and was highly successful. The escape was documented in a book and eventually made into a Movie starring Charles Bronson and Robert Duvall.

Unfortunately Roger was tragically killed 3 years ago near Wichita when his helicopter crashed in a corn field on his way to a USFS surveying contract. I don't know if they ever figured out the cause of the crash. I'm thinking maybe some sort of catastrophic malfunction of the machine.

Here is a short video speeded up that I took of driving through the tunnel last month.

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This got me curious about what the longest road tunnel in the world is, So I googled and found it to be the Laerdal tunnel underneath a mountain range in Norway. That tunnel is about 16 miles long and intersects three caves that you can actually pull over into for a break from the confines. Definitely on my bucket list. A couple photos.