The dark opening at the waterline of Lake Oroville is the timbered mouth of a railroad tunnel, and the bare slopes around it are lake bed. The photograph was taken from a boat on July 17th, 2014, at Berry Creek, and the archive that holds the picture files it under the Western Pacific. In 2021, the lake fell to about 22 percent of capacity that October, and the state said the water had uncovered ground that had been under it for decades. What shows when the water drops tells the story of twelve American railroads that went under reservoirs, whose lines they were, and where the trains went instead.

At the north end of Lake Mead, about three miles down a dirt road in the national recreation area, a foot trail leads into a town. There are concrete foundations, the front steps of a schoolhouse, and the remains of an ice cream parlor. This is Saint Thomas. At the lake’s high water mark, it lay sixty feet under, by the park service’s figure.

By the usual account, it has been out since about 2002, and photographs from February 2023 show it dry. Mormon settlers founded it in 1865 where the Muddy River meets the Virgin, believing they were in Utah or Arizona territory. At its peak, it was a farm town of about five hundred people. The railroad came late.

The San Pedro, Los Angeles, and Salt Lake, whose lines the Union Pacific owns today, built a branch down the valley from Moapa. By the standard history of Nevada railroads, the full twenty-one miles opened to Saint Thomas on June 7th, 1912. Then came Hoover Dam. Lake Mead began to fill in 1935.

The people of Saint Thomas sold their land, took down their houses, and left, many of them for Overton up the valley. Nobody built this railroad a new line because there was no town left to serve. The last six miles were given up between 1938 and 1939 as the water covered them. The rest still carries Union Pacific freight, two or three trains a week by Nevada’s rail plan of 2021.

The last man out was Hugh Lord. On June 11th, 1938, the day the post office closed, he rode away from his house with the lake at his front door. Some accounts add that he set the house on fire first. The town has come up several times since, and the park service records reunions of former residents there in 1945, 1963, and 2012.

In October 2015, after a year of drought, Detroit Lake in the Oregon Cascades stood about 143 feet below full. In the mud, a Marion County sheriff’s deputy, Dave Zorn, found a wooden freight wagon. A metal plate on it said it was built in 1875 by the Milburn Wagon Company of Toledo, Ohio. Beside it was an eight-sided pit lined with cement.

Both lay where the old town of Detroit had been before the water. Old Detroit began in 1889 as a construction camp of the Oregon Pacific Railroad, which was building up the canyon of the North Santiam River. In 1895, the lumberman A. B.

Hammond bought the line and renamed it the Oregon Central and Eastern. One account calls the town little more than a railroad junction. It also had a Forest Service ranger station, which the agency’s archaeologist describes as the beginning of full administration and protection of the forest reserves. The Army Corps of Engineers finished Detroit Dam in June 1953, and the lake rose over the town site.

The old highway and the railroad grade went under with it. This railroad was not moved to higher ground. By one account, the track above the dam was simply taken up in the 1950s, and the next town upstream lost its trains. The people of Detroit incorporated a new town in 1952 on the side of a former Hammond lumber camp beside the reservoir and the highway, and some of them hauled their houses up to it.

The wagon had a guardian. Cara Kelly, an archaeologist for the Forest Service, and the deputy kept its location to themselves to keep looters away. She told the Salem newspaper that a few weeks in the open air had probably done it more harm than its decades underwater. Old residents told her the cement pit may have been a goldfish pond beside the ranger station.

Photographs in the National Archives show the lake at what was then an all-time low in the fall of 1973, and it was low again in 2001. West of Gunnison, Blue Mesa is, in a normal year, the largest body of water in Colorado. This is not a normal year. In August 2026, the Bureau of Reclamation put it under a quarter full, and the Gunnison River was running in its old channel across the lake bed.

Colorado Public Radio reported at the end of September that it had dropped below 20 percent, lower than it had ever been. The ruins of a town called Iola are out in the open again. Iola was a railroad stop. The Denver and Rio Grande reached Gunnison in August 1881, built on down the river that winter, and ran its first train through the Black Canyon in August 1882.

William Jackson Palmer laid it three feet between the rails because narrow gauge was cheaper to fit into mountain country. The Park Service describes Iola in 1896 as ten or fifteen buildings, among them a store, a railroad depot, and cattle loading pens. Freight ran until 1949, when the line from Gunnison to Montrose was abandoned. So the trains were gone before the water came.

Blue Mesa Dam was built in 1965. The Park Service says Iola was abandoned in the early 1960s, that most of its buildings were taken apart and burned, and that two to three hundred people along the river were displaced. Three railroad stations went under with the grade, Sapinero among them, and Sapinero was rebuilt up the slope beside US 50. Here, nobody had to move a railroad.

It had already gone. This is at least the third time in eight years. In September 2018, the Park Service closed the Iola boat ramp, and that fall the foundations came up as they did again in 2021. One building that will not come back is the Sportsman’s Hotel, a fishing resort on the river where former President Herbert Hoover stayed in the summer of 1939.

The same narrow gauge crossed Marshall Pass. Here, it ran on the valley floor, and the valley floor is what a reservoir takes. In January 2007, the instruments at Wolf Creek Dam in southern Kentucky warned the Army Corps of Engineers that the dam might fail. The Corps dropped Lake Cumberland about forty feet and held it there while it repaired the foundation.

The drawdown lasted until 2013. At the upper end of the lake, at Burnside, the old town came out of the water. By the town’s own history, low water shows concrete sidewalks, stone foundations, and parts of the old railroad line. Burnside sat where the South Fork meets the Cumberland River at the head of steamboat navigation, and the Cincinnati Southern, later worked by the Southern Railway, crossed the river there.

Freight changed between boat and train on its waterfront. The low part of town, which some people called the bottoms, held Main Street and the riverfront businesses. The novelist Harriet Arnow, who grew up in Burnside, later wrote a book about the place and called it Old Burnside. The Corps began Wolf Creek Dam in August 1941, was delayed by the war, and finished it for flood control in 1950.

The lake behind it runs about 101 miles. At Burnside, the Southern Railway rerouted its track and built a new bridge over the river. The Corps tore down the houses, barns, and stores below the line. A local newspaper wrote that year of several magnificent bridges, of the complete disappearance of Old Burnside, and of a new Burnside growing up the hill.

A former resident told Kentucky’s public television that a rented house in Old Burnside cost ten or twelve dollars a month. The town’s history adds that the old railway tunnels are still there, tucked into the wooded hills where a hiker may come on them. In the spring of 2014, the Corps let the lake come back up to its old summer level, and the sidewalks went under again. For about seven years, it had been possible to see where Main Street ran.

In 1983, the Tennessee Valley Authority drew down Watauga Lake in the mountains at the northeast corner of Tennessee to work on the dam. For a few weeks, the town of Butler was back. Former residents walked its roads and found stone walls and foundations. By one account, two buildings stood out from the rest.

One was Don Stout’s shoe shop, built of stone. The other was the jail, one room of concrete. The TVA’s history says the same thing happened in the drought of 1954. The railroad came to Butler in 1902, on a line between Elizabethton and Mountain City, and it took out lumber, iron ore, and farm produce.

A general store stood beside the Southern Railway tracks. The valley flooded often, and in 1940, it flooded badly. Six people were killed, houses were destroyed, and the railroad was washed out. Lynn Farmer, a volunteer at the Butler Museum whose mother lived in the old town, told a Tennessee television station that the railroad was never replaced.

So this railroad was drowned twice, once by the river, and once on purpose. Congress approved Watauga Dam in 1941 for flood control. Work stopped for the war and resumed in 1946, and the gates closed on December 1st, 1948. The counts of the families moved do not agree.

One says a little over 600, another 735, and the museum, 761. The TVA’s history says contractors moved 125 houses and 50 other buildings. Butler is often called the only incorporated town the TVA ever flooded, and the agency’s own history calls it the town that wouldn’t drown. Joe Lipford, 101 years old and one of the last people living who knew the old streets, put it another way to the same station.

“That dam ruined this country here,” he said. The museum opened in 2000, and some of what it shows was picked up from the bed of the lake in 1983. Behind Grand Coulee Dam, the Columbia River is a lake about 150 miles long, and in most years it is lowered in the spring. When it is, a town comes up five miles north of Kettle Falls.

The National Park Service says plainly that Marcus is visible during the drawdown. A regional history site describes sidewalks, streets, and foundations standing clear for a few days or weeks. One visitor’s account has the flats exposed in April 2023. Marcus was a railroad town.

The Spokane Falls and Northern came up the Columbia to it on the way to the mines of Canada, and the line became part of the Great Northern, with one branch running on to Nelson in British Columbia, and another west to Republic. The Great Northern kept its terminal at Marcus, and a depot stood at the junction. By 1940, the town had close to 600 people and a main street with a bank, a movie theater, and a hospital. Grand Coulee Dam was built in the 1930s for irrigation, power, and jobs.

Its reservoir flooded eleven towns and put about 3,000 people out of their homes, and Marcus was the largest. It moved to a bench about 145 feet above the old streets at about $125 a house. The government rebuilt 26 miles of railroad. The Great Northern gave up its old bridge at Marcus in 1941 for a higher one at Kettle Falls, and its terminal moved there, too.

The water was not only over towns. The falls at Kettle Falls were a fishing ground of the tribes of the Northwest. In June 1940, between 8,000 and 10,000 people gathered above the falls for three days at what was called the ceremony of tears. Two years later, the lake covered the falls, 90 feet deep by the government’s projection.

Over old Marcus, the same table gives 45 feet, and a later account, 60. Either way, it is shallow enough that a spring drawdown brings the streets back. At Lake Koocanusa in Montana, almost nothing comes up, and that is the reason it is on the list. Libby Dam was completed in 1972.

The reservoir behind it is about 90 miles long and was planned 370 feet deep, and the town of Rexford is under it. The Flathead Beacon reported in 2019 that in some years, when the water is very low, an old set of stairs from a building appears on the shore. Sonar shows foundation rubble and the outlines of streets. Rexford was a Great Northern town.

The railroad’s main line came through this valley, and its locomotives stopped at Rexford to take on water. Speculators had laid the town out about a mile from where the track finally went, so the town picked itself up and moved to the rails. Then the rails left. Sixty miles of the Great Northern main line were moved out of the valley, and the new line went under a mountain through the Flathead tunnel.

Here is the one piece of engineering worth explaining. A railroad follows the valley floor because the river has already found the gentlest grade through the mountains. A reservoir takes exactly that ground. So the replacement line has to go up onto the valley wall, across side canyons and spurs of rock.

That means tunnels, high bridges, and often a new ruling grade, the steepest climb, which sets how much one locomotive can pull. The steepest mile of a railroad decides what the whole line is worth, and a dam can move that mile. Rexford’s depot, its church, and its general store were hauled to Eureka, where they stand in the Tobacco Valley Historical Village. Five smaller places went off the map, Warland and Tweed among them.

Dale White, a retired logger and campground host at the new Rexford, told the Beacon his family was offered at most $7,000 for about eight acres. “You can move buildings,” he said, “but you can’t move an atmosphere. ” And then he added, “I’m not bitter. I just wish we had our river back.

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Every winter the Tennessee Valley Authority lowers Fontana Lake fifty or sixty feet to make room for spring floods, and every winter the lake gives something back. Just west of Bryson City, a concrete bridge of the old state highway comes out of the water at Lands Creek, and in early April or late fall you can walk the shore to it. That highway is the one whose replacement became the road to nowhere. The railroad has its own story.

This was the Murphy branch of the Southern Railway. The rails reached Asheville in 1880, and the next year work began on 116 miles more west to the town of Murphy. Below Bryson City, the track followed the Tuckasegee River to Bushnell, which the local Chamber of Commerce remembers as one of the larger towns of the region in the 1930s, a freight center with three stores and a boarding house. While the dam was going up, a spur from Bushnell carried thousands of carloads of cement and machinery to the site.

Then the lake took Bushnell, Judson, and the old grade. In 1943, the railroad was rebuilt on higher ground between Bryson City and Wesser, 23. 7 miles by one account, and the new line opened on June 30th, 1944. Instead of following the river, it climbs out of the valley on a series of sweeping curves.

About a mile east of Almond, it crosses the lake on a bridge 777 feet long set on five concrete piers 160 feet high. Those piers were built first on dry ground with a temporary road bridge at their feet, and the concrete was finished by November 1943 before the water rose. So for most of the year, much of their height is under the lake, and only a winter drawdown shows how tall they are. The Great Smoky Mountains Railroad runs excursion trains over that bridge today, and for a few miles southwest of Bryson City, US 19 runs on the grade of the old line, the part that stayed above water.

In the hills of central Massachusetts, at a gate numbered 35 in the town of New Salem, a level path follows the shore of Quabbin Reservoir for about two miles. It is a railroad grade. A state poster at the reservoir says that when the water is low, you can see the foundation of the New Salem station along the shore, about a mile south of the gate. A photograph taken from the grade in August 2022 shows the water lying right beside it.

The line was chartered in 1869 as the Athol and Enfield, opened through to Springfield in 1873, and was bought by the Boston and Albany in 1880. It ran about 48 miles between Springfield and Athol, much of the way up the Swift River Valley. Its engineers called it the Rabbit Run because the stations were so close together that a train had to hop from one to the next. For the valley towns, it was how the mail came and how people got to school and to the shops.

Boston needed water. Between 1930 and 1939, the state built a dam and a dike across the valley, and in April 1938, four towns, Dana, Enfield, Greenwich, and Prescott, ceased to exist by law. About 2,500 people lost their homes, and the cemeteries were moved to a new one at Ware. Nobody relocated the Rabbit.

Thirty-six miles of it were abandoned. The state’s poster dates the railroad from 1869 to 1935. One account says most of it closed in 1934, and a photograph shows the rails coming up at Enfield in July 1935. The tunnel that carried the river past the dam was sealed with rock on August 14th, 1939, and the reservoir took seven years to fill until June 1946.

The water covered the roads that had joined the four towns, and some of them can still be followed down to the edge where they go under. Much of Dana stayed above the water, and its cellar holes can be visited. There is a plan to turn about six miles of the old railroad in Athol and New Salem into a trail. On the Merced River below Yosemite, when Lake McClure falls under about 700 feet of elevation, a row of concrete piers comes out of the water.

They are about 250 feet tall, and they once carried a railroad. In February 2014, with the lake about a fifth full, a hiker named Doug Vanderley walked two miles of lake bed from Bagby and told the San Francisco Chronicle he had found old bridge footings and tunnels he could walk through. A year later, the lake was at 6 percent. This was the Yosemite Valley Railroad, which ran from Merced up the river canyon to El Portal at the edge of the national park, where passengers changed to stagecoaches and later to automobiles.

President Taft rode it in October 1909 and Franklin Roosevelt on July 15th, 1938. It carried lumber, limestone, and barium, as well as tourists. And it has the odd distinction of having been drowned twice by two dams built at the same place about forty years apart. The first was Exchequer Dam, built by the Merced Irrigation District directly over the track.

The district opened bids in September 1923 and had to build the railroad a new line around its lake, seventeen miles with four concrete tunnels and five steel bridges at a cost of more than $3 million. The largest, the Barrett Bridge, was 1,600 feet long with the rails 236 feet above low water. A local history calls it the longest and highest bridge in the west in its day. The first passenger train crossed in April 1926.

The railroad ran its last scheduled train on August 24th, 1945, after floods and a fire. The bridge stayed where it was. Then the district built a much larger dam, which first filled in 1967, and the relocated line went under, too, tunnels, piers, and all. The railroad’s historians say the western section of the Barrett Bridge sank before it could be floated out and that it lies below the reservoir still, to be seen only in the deepest droughts.

Other tunnels farther up the canyon now carry a road. On the Sacramento River arm of Shasta Lake, near Lakehead, there are railroad tunnels under the water, and local people know them by number. In August 2021, kayakers paddled through one of them. On September 17th, the local historian Jeremy Tuggle filmed tunnel number four surfacing with the lake 169 feet below the crest of the dam.

By October, it stood fully in the open. By the middle of January, it was gone again. In October 2022, its top was showing once more. The tunnels belong to the first railroad up the Sacramento River Canyon, the California and Oregon, a Central Pacific line that the Southern Pacific later ran as its Shasta route.

More than 1,000 Chinese laborers worked on it from a camp at Kennett in 1883. Tuggle dates tunnel number four to 1884 and says it was rebuilt in 1925. Kennett grew into a copper town with a smelter whose smoke killed plants and ruined farms up to fifteen miles away. It lies today under about 400 feet of water.

The government opened bids for Shasta Dam in June 1938, and the railroad ran right through the site. The Park Service puts the relocation at 30 miles. A federal engineering record says 26 miles of old line were replaced by 32 miles of new. One of the new tunnels was used first to carry the river around the works.

The new line crosses the lake on the Pit River Bridge, trains below and the highway above, 500 feet over the old riverbed. Storage began in February 1944. That leaves the trestle from the start of this video. In October 2008, with the lake 150 feet down, a reporter for the Redding newspaper found tunnels five and six in the mud below Lakeshore Drive, and near tunnel five, half of a metal trestle lying on its side.

Chuck Hornbeck, a retired civil engineer and local historian, then 78, explained it. “They never scrapped it out,” he said. “It was wartime and there was no manpower. ” He added that in 1977, a friend had run a boat through tunnel number four.

The Western Pacific built its roadbed and tunnels through the Feather River Canyon in 1909, and from 1949, its California Zephyr carried passengers through here in dome cars. East of Oroville, the track kept to the river, which was the whole reason for the route. The railroad called itself the Feather River Route. Then California chose the same canyon for the tallest dam in the United States, and the lake behind it would reach many miles up the river.

Work on the detour began in May 1957 with two tunnels. The finished line, by the figures of the railroad’s historical society, is about 23 miles long with five tunnels totaling more than 21,000 feet and a bridge over the North Fork 1,000 feet long and 200 feet high. It cost $40 million, and the state paid. Trains began using it on October 22nd, 1962.

The old main line was left on the floor of the canyon with four of its tunnels, and the dam was topped out in 1967. One old tunnel near the dam stayed dry, and the builders used it for their own trains hauling fill to the embankment. On October 7th, 1965, two of those trains, forty cars each, one loaded and one empty, met head-on at its mouth. Four men were killed, about 10,000 gallons of diesel fuel burned, and the fire spread through 100 acres of forest.

That tunnel is on the route of a public trail today. The others are under the lake, and at least one of them shows itself when California runs short of water.