by Dan McCaffery for the Sarnia Observer

(2003) “One of the great engineering feats of the age.” That’s how the Sarnia Observer described the completion of the original St. Clair River Tunnel in a special supplement published on Sept. 19, 1890. And more than a century later, few would quarrel with that assessment.

Toiling with mules, shovels, picks and a derrick powered by a 50-horsepower hoisting engine, workers on both sides of the river dug towards one another beginning in 1889.Work went on for thirteen months, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with about 700 men taking part. The pioneer drillers, who had to handle gas pockets, water leaks and quicksand, completed the job just 15 days behind the schedule of the men and women who built the second tunnel a century later.

“The tunnel was literally dug by hand,” historian Clare Gilbert told a Sarnia audience in 1991.”They started by using shovels and spades but they would bend, and the blue clay was so sticky they had to scrape it off each shovelful. They worked for 17 cents an hour, until they complained about working in air chambers. Then their pay dropped to 12 cents an hour, but they were given a 14-hour day to make up the pay difference.”

On Aug. 20, 1890, workers from both sides met and punched the first hole through the clay. Two days later, an opening was shoveled through and Chief Engineer Joseph Hobson walked through. A signal was given and every whistle in Sarnia and Port Huron was blown in celebration. They had plenty to cheer about. After passing through thousands of metres of clay, the two hydraulic tunnelling shields used by the workers were a scant quarter of an inch out of alignment. The project put Sarnia on the map. In fact, the community was known for decades as ‘The Tunnel City.’

Sadly, the tunnel came with a fearful price. Three workers died building it and several railroad workers were asphyxiated by choking fumes before steam engines were replaced by electric locomotives in 1904. But they had built a tunnel that lasted until almost the end of the 20th century. In fact, when it was replaced in the late 1990s, the old tunnel was still working fine. A new passageway had only been built because the original couldn’t accommodate double-stacked train cars.

Other than that, more than 100 years after it was built, there wasn’t a thing wrong with it.