locomotives, railcars, rails and other material on wagons and sleighs to what is now Truckee, California and worked the winter of 1867–68 on their way down Truckee canyon ahead of the tracks being completed to Truckee. In Truckee canyon, five Howe truss bridges had to be built. This gave them a head start on getting to the "easy" miles across Nevada. In order to keep the higher portions of the Sierra grade open in the winter, of timber snow sheds were built between Blue Cañon and Truckee in addition to utilizing snowplows pushed by locomotives, as well as manual shovelling. With the advent of more efficient oil fired steam and later diesel electric power to drive plows, flangers, spreaders, and rotary snow plows, most of the wooden snowsheds have long since been removed as obsolete. Tunnels 1–5 and Tunnel 13 of the original 1860s tunnels on Track 1 of the Sierra grade remain in use today, while additional new tunnels were later driven when the grade was double tracked over the first quarter of the twentieth century. In 1993, the Southern Pacific Railroad (which operated the CPRR-built Oakland–Ogden line until its 1996 merger with the Union Pacific) closed and pulled up the section of Track #1 over the summit running between the Norden complex (Shed 26, MP 192.1) and the covered crossovers in Shed #47 (MP 198.8) about a mile east of the old flyover at Eder, bypassing and abandoning the tunnel 6–8 complex, the concrete snowsheds just beyond them, and tunnels 9–12 ending at MP 195.7, all of which had been located on Track 1 within two miles of the summit. Since then all east- and westbound traffic has been run over the Track #2 grade crossing the summit about one mile (1.6 km) south of Donner Pass through the Tunnel #41 ("The Big Hole") running under Mt. Judah between Soda Springs and Eder, which was opened in 1925 when the summit section of the grade was double tracked. This routing change was made because the Track 2 and Tunnel 41 Summit crossing is far easier and less expensive to maintain and keep open in the harsh Sierra winters. On June 18, 1868, the Central Pacific reached Reno, Nevada, after completing of railroad up and over the Sierras from Sacramento, California. By then the railroad had already been prebuilt down the Truckee River on the much flatter land from