The Western Railroad  was surveyed and engineered by Maj. George Washington Whistler in the 1830s. It was the first railroad to cross mountains and Editor Buckingham of the Boston Courier predicted in 1827 it would be as useless as a railroad from Boston to the moon.” The route utilized portions of the Pontoosic Turnpike stage road to Albany. It was surveyed on horseback, to this day is some of the most remote and forbidding territory in the state. When Complete the Western was the highest (1458 ft.) and longest (150 mi.) railroad in the world.

Whistler was the father of one of the most famous American painters, James MacNeill Whistler. His second wife. Anna, has also become an icon by way of “Portrait of the Painter’s Mother” (1871).

Alexander Birnie was the artisan responsible for the Keystone Arches. A second-generation. Scottish stonemason from Stockbridge, MA, he was hired to construct 27 bridges, culverts and walls for the mountain segment of the line. On this portion of abandoned railbed, we cross two spectacular stone arch bridges, 65 and 70 ft. high and pass a breathtaking stone retaining wall. Also on this section of the trail are two impressive hand-dug cuts through solid rock. The builders of 1840 had only black powder to loosen rocks and picks, shovels and horse carts to remove it.

Stone taken from the cuts was used to construct secondary walls, but for the ‘ring stones’, or ‘voussoirs’ of the arches themselves, Chester Blue granite was utilized. This had to be transported in wagons to the railhead and brought to the site on the primitive rail equipment of the day, a formidable task in itself.

The trains you see still cross other examples of these mortarless bridges here, testimony to their integrity. The average locomotive in 1840 weighed about 12,000 lbs. The locomotives of today, which traverse arches still in use on this line, weigh in the neighborhood of 415,000 lbs., those bridges showing no ill effects from their crossing.

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