Mouse,

Maybe that's why the AT&SF chose to design a route crossing the mountains there, a mere 40 years after the completion of Tehachapi. The plan and designs intended using several much longer tunnels, and at a much more gentle grade.

It's too bad WWI intervened and ended that effort.

This was going to branch from where the old line turned north back to Mojave (the subject of the Rogers Dry Lake thread) up along the base of the Tehachapi's (where the cement mines are today), into a set of tunnels (near where the water project tunnel ends today), and down along the foothills on the Valley side (the onion fields), cutting back in near Edison.

Even with serving the half a million folks in the high desert via a jog to Palmdale, this would save time and money, over the longer and far more difficult Tehachapi pass ("money pit"?) route.