>> male narrator: For centuries, the way north has attracted a breed of traveler eager to see its stark, magnificent scenery and undaunted by its cold and extreme hardships. The land making up Alaska and Canada's Yukon Territory and northwest British Columbia stretches for thousands of square miles, most of it unmarked by roads or trails. Getting to this almost mythical landscape today is mainly by the Alaska Highway, commercial airlines, or by cruise ship. But one form of transportation in Alaska has been around for over 100 years. [train horn blows] It is known as the Alaska Railroad, and it is the last full-service railroad in North America. How it got here and survived is a story of struggle, success, and failure in a land of extreme beauty and some of the harshest weather on the globe. >> From 1897 until the current time, there have been 26 railroads that actually laid track, had locomotives, and operated for a year. [train chugging] >> narrator: In 1867, the Civil War in the United States had been over for two years, and the country was rebuilding. The Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads were drawing closer to one another in a race to meet on a lonely plain in northern Utah. Secretary of State William Seward under President Andrew Johnson purchased for the United States the territory of Russian Alaska for $7.2 million. 20 years later in 1897, the Territory of Alaska measured 586,000 square miles in size, twice as large as the state of Texas. Its neighbor to the east was the Yukon Territory of Canada, itself an area the size of California. Barely anybody lived in the Yukon or inland Alaska other than the indigenous native peoples who had occupied the lands for thousands of years. By the end of the 19th century, a stampede of people would sweep over these two vast territories that would change the north country forever. On July 17, 1897, the steamship<i> Portland</i> docked on the Seattle waterfront. A large crowd was waiting to meet the ship. In the cargo hold, it carried $700,000 in Klondike gold. The rush was on. As word of the Klondike gold find spread, 100,000 men and women from all walks of life descended on Seattle, San Francisco, and Vancouver. Every available ship in the harbors were pressed into service and heading north through the inside passage. Their destination: a tiny inlet off the upper Lynn Canal and fast-growing community of Dyea, Alaska. What awaited the gold-crazed stampeders was the difficult and often hostile Chilkoot Pass, 27 miles north from Dyea. Each individual entering into the Canadian Yukon was required to carry at least 2,000 pounds of food by whatever means. Once over the Chilkoot Pass, the stampeders headed northeasterly, dragging their sleds of supplies toward Bennett Lake. There they constructed boats of every description, waited for the spring thaw, and then floated 700 miles downstream to Dawson City. This was the quickest route to the gold fields. On a nearby inlet south of Dyea, the town of Skagway was taking shape. Prospector and trader William Moore had staked a homestead at the mouth of the Skagway River. Moore looked into the heights above the valley and envisioned a railroad to the Klondike. He did not realize it at the time, but railway history was about to be made. An enterprising former mayor of Minneapolis and engineer for the Northern Pacific Railway, George Brackett, got a jump start on a route to the Klondike, gathering investors and constructing a wagon road up the valley to what had been renamed the White Pass Trail. Meanwhile, some Canadian businessmen who knew William Moore and his idea of rails to the Yukon became interested and obtained financing from British interests. They organized the Pacific and Arctic Railway & Navigation Company. Construction planning then began. This was not the first railroad in Alaska to lay tracks down. There were others. >> 1897 saw the construction of the first railroad that consisted of laying tracks with a steam locomotive and producing work. And that was at Unga Island. The Alaska Cyanamid Mining Company built a 30-inch gauge railroad--30 inches between the rails--and they operated a brand-new locomotive called the<i> Apollo.</i> And the function of the railroad was to transport equipment and materials for a gold mine on the island of Unga, down off the Aleutian Peninsula. >> narrator: Southeast Alaska would see the construction of many small railroads that would serve logging interests or gold mines. Most of these railroads had a brief life before the resources were exhausted or easier means of transportation were constructed. Michael J. Heney, who helped build the Canadian Pacific Railway, met in a hotel in Skagway with Sir Thomas Tancrede, line surveyors, and financial backers from England. The surveyors hired by Tancrede took one look up the valley and concluded the walls were too sheer and the grades too steep to build a railroad. >> The optimist goes to the top of the hill, and he looks at all the barriers between the tidewater and the summit at White Pass. And engineering dictates that about 4% is the maximum grade you can go up with a steam engine and expect to carry any kind of payload that's profitable by the time you get to the end of the track. >> narrator: Tancrede was not dismayed by the report. He turned to the big Irishman, Mike Heney. Heney told Tancrede, "Give me enough dynamite, and I'll build a road to hell." Heney, nicknamed the Irish Prince, was given the go-ahead to begin constructing the railroad. After five initial surveys were completed, the engineers decided to build a 3-foot narrow-gauge railway instead of what was normally considered standard gauge. Standard-gauge rails are set apart at 4 feet, 8 1/2 inches. Building a standard-gauge railroad costs considerably more, because more material must be removed in an excavated cut; wider, stronger bridges built to deal with heavier loads; and curves on the rails are required to be gentler. A narrow-gauge railway, on the other hand, made sense both financially and from an engineering standpoint. Construction began at the Skagway docks in May 1898 and proceeded down Broadway Street through the middle of town. Nearly all the work between Skagway and the White Pass summit was in solid rock. Workers used immense quantities of blasting powder and dynamite to clear the right of way. >> All the drilling had to be done by hand. There was one person that would be holding the drill itself. Another person would have a sledgehammer to tap it. Make one hit, insert the drill, and make another hit. Eventually you had to drill through several feet of very hard granite before you could put your charge in. And they had to do this over the entire rock face, just a few feet apart all the way through. This took a tremendous amount of time, energy, and in some cases, the people had to be hung from the top of the cliffs by ropes. [explosion] >> narrator: Blasting was just one thing the workers and engineers had to contend with. The other was the weather. With temperatures exceeding 30 degrees below 0 and gusting winds, workers were numb from the cold. Drifting snow hampered visibility. Often they could not see across the 40-foot gap at Tunnel Mountain. >> They had never had to deal with winters so bad that you had to actually shovel the snow off of the grade 20 feet down to get to the rock to plant the charge to blast the rock. I mean, there were more snow shovelers involved in snow shoveling on the payroll in the months of January and February of 1899 than there were construction crewmen out there building bridges and laying track. Just shoveling snow. I mean, that boggles the mind when one begins to think nowadays we just take a D-7 out there and move it out of the way. These guys had picks and shovels. >> narrator: Workers would spend a day clearing snow from the area, only to have it drift back during the night. Heney pressed on. By early February 1899, Heney's crews reached the summit of the White Pass, where the boundary of British Columbia and Canada had been determined. About the time the rails were being spiked at the White Pass summit, word of a gold strike to the east in Atlin, British Columbia, lured away hundreds of railway workers. >> Guys were always running off to the gold fields. You'd lose your crew as soon as you got them up here. You pay 'em, and they were gone, right? So you always had the crew that was coming, the crew that was here, and the crew that was leaving. >> narrator: By early July 1899, construction crews reached the shores of Bennett Lake in British Columbia. This effectively shut down the hazardous overland Chilkoot Trail. The gold stampeders could now land in Skagway and take the train to Bennett Lake. >> The big challenge for the railroad was to get over White Pass and transport people to Lake Bennett. And the vast majority of people built their own boats from available timber--slab boats right there on the shores of Lake Bennett--and then floated down the lake system into the Yukon and off to Whitehorse through the rapids there. >> narrator: And treacherous rapids they were. Many stampeders were drowned trying to run the Whitehorse rapids of Miles Canyon. A short tramway with wooden rails was built around the Whitehorse rapids to eliminate the danger. While the stampeders continued to trickle into the Klondike, they would board stern-wheelers at Bennett Lake and cruise north then east into Tagish Lake. There the gold seekers would head either north onto Marsh Lake to continue to Dawson or south and east to a point on an isthmus on Taku Inlet near Atlin Lake. By July 1900, the three-foot narrow-gauge Atlin Shortline Railway, or Taku Tram, went into business with a Baldwin locomotive known as<i> The Duchess.</i> They pulled open-air passenger cars until their retirement in 1921. The White Pass & Yukon continued construction between Whitehorse and Caribou Crossing, or Carcross. The section between Carcross and Bennett posed some challenges for the engineers working in this area. >> And the reason is because there's some very severe granite work to be done along the tracks along Lake Bennett. So they weren't even sure for a long time--several months-- whether they were going to put in the Lake Bennett section at all. But they eventually decided that it was worthwhile. But it surprises a lot of people to find out that the biggest explosion in White Pass construction history was along Lake Bennett. People assume that it was along White Pass, but it's not the case. >> narrator: Finally in July 1900, the White Pass & Yukon was completed. A golden spike-driving ceremony was held in Carcross, where the Whitehorse and Bennett Lake sections met. >> When the final spike was driven in Carcross, there was thousands of people here from all over the territory celebrating that event. And without that event in Carcross, the development of the Yukon Territory generally would have been severely retarded. >> narrator: Now a person could ride in comfort on the 110-mile distance between Skagway and Whitehorse. But by the time the rails reached into Whitehorse, the Klondike gold rush was largely over. >> Their initial end of construction was at a place called Fort Selkirk, about halfway between Whitehorse and Dawson. There the river navigation was real good, but they found that they could navigate the water between Fort Selkirk and Whitehorse by using a little bit smaller steamers, and they did this up to 1954. >> narrator: In 1899, a minor gold rush was going on in the Turnagain Arm villages of Hope and Sunrise on the Kenai Peninsula in south central Alaska. Steamships that plied the waters of Cook Inlet serving these villages ran on coal. For a time, the sleepy little coal mining and fishing village of Homer on Kachemak Bay supplied the ships with coal. The shores around Homer were known for its coal seams since the 1880s. A short 7.2 mile railway was constructed from the coal source to an Anchorage point on the Homer Spit. The Homer coal was supplied to ships and villages on Cook Inlet until 1902, when bunker fuel largely replaced coal as a fuel source for ships. In the Yukon, the objective of the gold-crazed stampeders was Dawson City, where the mouth of the Klondike River joined the Yukon River 700 miles downstream from Bennett Lake. By 1899, the population of Dawson City was estimated to be 30,000 people. The parliament of Canada granted a charter in the name of the Klondike Mines Railway to a consortium of businessmen and speculators. Among these businessmen was a local man, Thomas O'Brien. >> And he was a fellow that had been in 40 Mile for--since 1896. So he'd already been here for a couple of years before the gold rush, and he decided there was going to be a need for a transportation system. And he was an entrepreneur type of guy that had lots of businesses--business ventures going on at the time. >> narrator: The charter called for the railway to be built from Dawson City to Fort Selkirk and link up with the White Pass & Yukon Railway. But nothing happened. The idea for the railway languished as O'Brien fought for the terminus of the railway to be in his little part of Klondike City, across the Klondike River from Dawson. >> He wanted it to be a railway that ended in Klondike--ended and started in Klondike City. And he had a brewery there, and he had a big mercantile store. And he thought that by having the railway terminus in Klondike City, that would help his other businesses there. >> narrator: While the Klondike Mines Railway was awaiting construction, the communities of Dawson and Klondike City were consuming millions of feet of trees for buildings, heat, and fuel to run the power plants. Just about every available tree within the Dawson area was being cut and fed into a sawmill, boiler, or woodstove. The hills were soon bare. About 50 miles downriver on the Yukon from Dawson were two coal mines: the Cliff Creek Mine and the Coal Creek Mine. In the early fall of 1899, the North American Transportation and Trading Company purchased and shipped in an eight-ton narrow-gauge Porter locomotive from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and built track to haul coal to ships on the Yukon River. When the Cliff Creek Mine railway began its operation in late 1899, the Porter locomotive became the first operating steam locomotive in the Yukon, surpassing even the White Pass & Yukon Railway. It provided coal to the Dawson power plants for four years. The stampeders who came to Dawson dreaming of being rich beyond their wildest imagination were finding disappointment. Fully 1/3 who began gave up and returned to their homes in the south. But rumors of a new gold strike came in with the first stern-wheelers from the Bering Sea in the spring of 1899. Talk quickly spread about a strike far to the west at a place called Cape Nome, a cold and desolate place in the western Alaska Territory. As soon as many could pack their belongings, they squeezed aboard the stern-wheelers for the 1,300 mile journey down the Yukon River to Saint Michael. There they boarded oceangoing vessels and crossed the storm-ravaged Norton Sound for 100 miles to where the steamships anchored off Cape Nome. Thousands of whitewall tents crowded the golden shores in and around the town site first named Anvil City. In 1899, the population was estimated to be over 10,000. Supply ships brought in millions of board feet of lumber, and buildings went up hook and crook. Gold had been found on the drainages to the north of the settlement. Access to the diggings was across wet, spongy tundra and thawing permafrost. >> Horse and wagon was the option, and those required a road. A railroad across muskeg is easier to maintain than a road is. When it melts out from under you, you just throw a few more logs in there. And if you can get across it for the next two months or three months, that's all you need. They weren't building a permanent infrastructure. >> narrator: By July of 1900, a local miner, Charles Lane, built a narrow-gauge railroad four miles out of what was now the city of Nome to Anvil Creek. It was called the Wild Goose Railroad. 60 miles to the northeast of Nome lay the city of Council. And in 1902, Lane began building another Wild Goose Railroad seven miles over the mountains to Ophir Creek to serve the placer mining operations there. He used equipment from Nome that was barged up the Niukluk River to Council from Golovin Bay, some 50 miles east of Nome. Lane decided to sell some of his interest in the mining company, and the name was changed to the Nome Arctic Company and the railroad to the Seward Peninsula Railroad. The Council Wild Goose Railroad's name was changed as well to the Golovin Bay Railroad. By 1902, freight and passenger revenue on the Seward Peninsula Railroad was thriving. More Climax locomotives were purchased. Miners further north were clamoring for rail service to haul in the heavy mining equipment they needed to mine the creeks. By 1905, 30 miles of track had been laid north. While mining and railroading in and around the Nome area was doing well in 1902, plans were in place to construct a standard-gauge railroad inland some 30 miles from Solomon on the coast east of Nome to Council City. From Council, an ambitious design of crisscrossing the Seward Peninsula with this railroad was born. Early in the building season of 1903, the steamer<i> Aztec</i> unloaded 165,000 railroad ties and 51 miles of railroad track. Construction of the railroad began at the mouth of the Solomon River and proceeded to the northeast. By the end of the season, ten miles of track had been laid. The village of Solomon, not far from the docks in Dickson, was booming. The railroad established repair facilities there. And in Dickson, saloons and restaurants were built. New managers pushed construction 35 miles to Penelope Creek, where they completely ran out of building material. In 1906, the company was broke. No further funds came forth. And by 1907, all operations had ceased. The railroad locomotives and equipment were parked next to a saltwater inlet in Dickson, not far from Solomon. Before minerals caused the craze to head north into Alaska and the Yukon, there was the fishing industry. Yakutat, Alaska, had one large cannery that was completed in 1904. >> Right after the turn of the century, a group of Seattle businessmen thought that fish canning and packing would be a pretty lucrative thing to get into, particularly with the number of fish that were in the area. So the idea was to build a railroad, harvest the trees as they built the railroad, to cut wood to build the cannery and build the railroad and haul fish from the Situk ten miles to the east--Situk and Antlen estuary-- to the cannery that they built here in town. >> narrator: A ten-mile standard-gauge railroad was constructed from the cannery to Situk on Johnson's Slough, where small boats and fishing scows could tie up and off-load their catches. The Yakutat & Southern operated in one form or another until the 1960s, where it deteriorated due to a lack of maintenance on the part of the owners. During its life, it earned the reputation of a one-of-a-kind railway. >> Far as I know, this is the only railroad in the world that was built to haul fish. And that's what it was designed for. And there was no other--there was no other aspect, economic aspect--to it besides the fish and the canning, and that sustained it. >> narrator: By the fall of 1902, it looked as if construction of the Klondike Mines Railway would begin. 18,000 feet of railroad track, or slightly less than two miles, and a former White Pass locomotive were placed on barges out of Whitehorse and shipped to Klondike City. By September, rails were laid at the waterfront in Dawson. In Klondike City, only a few hundred feet of track for the Klondike mines had been spiked down, hardly the planned 84 miles O'Brien had wanted by this time. The frustrated O'Brien built a brewery in Klondike City until financing became available and construction finally began in earnest in May 1906. By August, the railroad opened 15 miles of line out of Klondike City to the town of Grand Forks. By October of 1906, 31 miles of line was constructed to Sulphur Springs, where the line ended at a wye turnaround and roadhouse. Freight mainly consisted of cordwood for feeding boilers that produced steam to thaw frozen ground for placer mining. Some passenger service was offered. >> They hauled immense amounts of cordwood for the steam thawing plants that the dredgers used. The dredgers used thousands of cords of wood a year to thaw the ground in front of them. >> narrator: The Klondike Mines Railway ran each year of its operation at a slight profit but nothing worthy of profits for its investors. By the late fall of 1913, the last revenue train ran from Sulphur Springs to Klondike City. Private contractors with wagons were then hauling the cordwood. The Klondike Mines Railway was shut down for good. Its equipment and rolling stock was left to rust away in Klondike City. >> Well, I think that the Klondike Mines Railway got started off too late, really. I think they would have--they had intended to be able to get a lot of revenue from passenger traffic. But by the time they got their railway built, there was a good road system in place because of their delays. Even by 1900, there was roads along the ridges here and then roads that connected with the creeks that dropped down from the ridges. >> narrator: In 1912, the Detroit Yukon Mining Company began to erect two huge dredges just outside Klondike City. There they employed the use of four Porter locomotives that moved construction equipment and supplies on a spur of the KMYR. As white explorers and prospectors wound their way from the coasts into the unspoiled interior of Alaska and the Yukon, they were met by the native people who had occupied these lands for thousands of years. In 1900, two prospectors made Alaska's most important copper discovery while exploring the upper Kennecott Valley. A young mining engineer named Stephen Birch soon purchased a controlling interest in the property. He then transferred control of his firm to an organization known as the Alaska Syndicate, largely financed by the Guggenheim family and J.P. Morgan. This became the Kennecott Copper Corporation. Packhorses and sleds were able to haul sufficient materials to build and equip the mine and mill site, but a railway was necessary to move the ore. Construction first started from Valdez, but this led to difficulties with the Alaska Home Railroad, one of a few proposed railroads out of Valdez. The Alaska Home Railroad made it as far as Keystone Canyon, roughly 17 miles, before funding dried up. Company officers with the Copper River & North Western eventually moved their operations to Katalla. The syndicate relied on gaining access to the Bering River coalfield, which the company meant to develop as an inexpensive source of fuel. Unfortunately, the government had imposed a 160-acre limitation on coal claims. And when large concerns like the syndicate tried to circumvent the law by consolidating groups of individual holdings, President Theodore Roosevelt withdrew all Alaska coal lands from entry. >> For President Roosevelt at the time strongly opposed the taking of any coal out of that area. What they were really afraid of, it appears, is that the Guggenheims would accumulate far too much power. And this would be a threat to other eastern interests. So in reality, what it was is not so much a conservation claim as an attempt to block competition with other eastern capitalists. In any case, President Roosevelt shut down the access to coal, and that was pretty much the end of that. >> narrator: Katalla, however, was situated on an unprotected beach rather than a sheltered, deepwater bay like both Valdez and Cordova. In 1907, a severe winter storm removed the breakwater and took out the wharf and destroyed most of the town of Katalla, effectively ending this as a railhead. The company subsequently relocated to Cordova. From Cordova, the railroad ran east across the Copper River Delta wetlands, then curved to the north. The lower Copper River was not navigable, but the upper portion was. To ease transportation problems, the stern-wheeler <i> Chitina</i> was shipped disassembled from Portland, Oregon, to Valdez, hauled over Marshall Pass, and reassembled on the Copper River. >> That was the first one. And it was assembled, by the way, totally with native labor. Then it was moved down to Mile 55. Now, Mile 55 in those days was as far down the river as you could get with steamships. That was the head of the notoriously dangerous Abercrombie Rapids, and you cannot get up or down those. There was just no way. But the idea was to get the railroad up to the head of that, mile 55, and then go from there. So that's what they did. >> narrator: Although only 195 miles long, the Copper River & North Western was an engineering marvel on a scale similar to the latter Alaska Highway and Trans-Alaska Pipeline. The Miles Glacier Bridge, often called the Million Dollar Bridge, despite the fact that it actually cost nearly $1 1/2 million to complete, was the route's single most ambitious feature. Located between the terminus of the Miles and Childs Glaciers, this 1,550-foot-long, four-span steel structure not only had to withstand the Copper River's eight-mile per hour current but an endless barrage of floating icebergs. In order to save time and money, the contractor built this bridge during the winter of 1909, 1910 on a wooden falsework erected on top of the frozen river. As the third span neared completion that spring, the temperature rose, and so did the water, causing the ice to drift downstream. Faced with losing their whole season's labor, the steelworkers managed to drag the 450-foot section back into position and bolt it permanently into place. They finished just in time. One hour later, the ice went out, taking all of their scaffolding with it. >> And then just to add a little extra thrill, about the time they were completing the bridge, the Miles Glacier there took a major surge and started advancing across the river toward the bridge, and they fully expected it to collide with the bridge structure and destroy their work. >> narrator: By comparison, erecting the wooden trestle over the Gilahina River probably seemed downright easy. >> The Gilahina was 880 feet long. It's a horseshoe-shaped trestle 94 feet at the center. There's about 1/2 million board feet in that thing. They built that in ten days, all 880 feet. They built it when it was no warmer than minus 30 and at some points reached as low as minus 60. They did this in ten days. I can't imagine any modern-day construction company meeting that. And this was done with ordinary manpower and blasting caps. That's how they did it. The whole railroad was built like that. >> narrator: In the 19-teens, the syndicate had planned to extend the CRNW north into the interior of Alaska to Eagle City on the Yukon River. >> The Copper River & North Western had designs on going to Eagle. If they had made it as far as the Tanana River, which wouldn't have been that big a deal to come up the Copper River, down the Gakona, up to Mentasta Pass as far as Tok, for example, then they could have turned and come right down the Tanana River into Fairbanks. >> narrator: The Copper River & North Western stood the test of time and brought immense wealth to its investors during the time it was in operation into the late 1930s. In what seemed to be an ongoing boom-and-bust cycle, by the early 1900s, the gold rushes in the Klondike and Seward Peninsula had faded away. But one more fell swoop came down upon the gold seekers as a new strike had been discovered on a little creek in interior Alaska by an Italian immigrant named Felix Pedro. In 1901, Pedro had traveled overland from Circle City on the Yukon River prospecting for placer gold when he made his discovery. At the same time, the stern-wheeler<i> Lavelle Young</i> was trying to navigate a course up the Tanana River to the village of Tanacross. Finding the water too shallow, they turned into the Chena Slough and navigated some miles until the draft was too shallow even here to proceed. Felix Pedro had watched the smoke from the<i> Lavelle Young's</i> stack from some miles away and made his way to the landing to greet the boatload of supplies. Falcon Joslin, the businessman and builder of the Coal Creek Mine outside Dawson, arrived in Fairbanks with the idea of building a railway from Chena City to the gold sources north of Fairbanks. By the autumn of 1904, Joslin had secured financing to build the narrow-gauge railroad, and he shipped over from the Coal Creek Mine in the Yukon the little Porter locomotive that has served well there. This became the Tanana Mines Railway number one. By the middle of May 1905, river steamers were off-loading materials in Chena City to construct the railroad. >> Chena came into being primarily as the headquarters for the Tanana Valley Railroad, which would haul these supplies out to the gold fields. As time went along, they realized that Fairbanks was going to play a more prominent part in this whole operation, so they built the line from Fairbanks to--rather from Chena into Fairbanks--and then at a point called Chena Junction, which is just about where the agricultural station is on the University of Alaska today, the line out to Gilmore and subsequently to Chatanika came into being. So the line was primarily built to haul heavy supplies, meaning these steam boilers, and actually wood, because wood was used not only for building structures but for heating purposes. >> narrator: On Independence Day 1905, a golden spike was driven in significance of the completion of the line between the two cities. From the wye at the School of Mines, the railroad took off to the Goldstream Valley, turned east and headed straight to the little mining community of Fox. By 1906, Joslin became determined to extend the railroad from Fox over the hills to the mining community of Chatanika, where promising deposits of placer and hard rock gold had been discovered. By mid-1907, new track arrived on the steamboats along with larger used locomotives from the White Pass & Yukon. By September 1907, the rails had been spiked down to Chatanika, completing the line 39 miles from Fairbanks. In 1904, after the gold strike in Fairbanks and the discovery of coal deposits in the Matanuska Valley, a group of Seattle businessmen got together and incorporated the Alaska Central Railroad. They envisioned a railroad that would begin in Seward, run roughly north to the Susitna Valley, then over Broad Pass near the Alaska Range to a terminus on the Tanana River at the present site of Nenana. By the summer of 1904, ships with miles of railroad track docked in Seward; and in August, construction began northward. By the end of that year, 20 miles of track had been completed to Kenai Lake, and the railroad was in operation. Progress on the rail line moved at a snail's pace. By 1907, 51 miles of track had been laid. At mile 49 began the loop district: a series of loop trestles constructed to gain as much elevation with a minimum road grade to get over into the Placer River Valley. The Panic of 1907 hit the railroad hard. And by 1908, they were forced into receivership. They reorganized as the Alaska Northern Railway Company with funding backed again by Seattle business interests and now some Canadian money. Plans had still been to build to Nenana, then Fairbanks; but the money ran out due to excessive costs in shipping freight to Alaska, the difficulty of constructing roadbed, and the small market potential. Enter the United States government. With Alaska's mineral and timber potential mostly owned by the federal government, Congress established the Alaska Railroad Commission and addressed the matter of rail transportation in the north. The commission determined that the only feasible way a railroad could be built to Fairbanks was to build it with government money. They considered two routes to Fairbanks: the planned route from Seward or an extension from Chitina on the Copper River & North Western Railroad. President William Howard Taft and his successor, Woodrow Wilson, both did not want the liability of the Guggenheim- Morgan Syndicate, owners of the Copper River & North Western, to become more powerful with government aid. >> Well, when you think about and look at the history and the times, the Guggenheims were quite successful in their operation. But Wilson was president at the time, and he had a personal dislike for the Guggenheims. And so he was president at the time that the selection of the route was to be made. And the engineering commission had basically--they had recommended the route from Cordova up through the interior, as opposed to the route that we have today. But because President Wilson did not like the Guggenheims, he selected this route. >> narrator: Wilson approved the route, and Congress established the Alaska Engineering Commission, or AEC, through the Department of the Interior to oversee construction of the railroad. Thus in 1915, the government of the United States of America purchased what remained of the Alaska Northern Railway and its crumbling infrastructure for $1.2 million. This in itself set off a bit of a rush, as men began pouring into Seward looking to find work on the government railroad. The man who was appointed as chief of construction was a young army lieutenant named Frederick Mears. At 36, Mears had just completed a tour of duty building the Panama Canal when he was selected to head construction of the Alaska Railroad by interior secretary Franklin Lane. Mears wasted no time in personally covering the proposed route north. He embarked at Ship Creek, now the site of Anchorage, made some inspections of new buildings under construction, then headed north by boat into the Chulitna drainages of the Susitna Valley, hiked over Broad Pass south of present-day Cantwell to the Nenana River, where they floated downriver to the stern-wheeler port of Nenana and caught a steamboat to Fairbanks. Mears was now confident the proposed route to the interior was a solid decision. Mears also determined that the site at Ship Creek would be a good choice for the Alaska Engineering Commission's headquarters. >> Ship Creek was the head of navigation on Turnagain Arm and Knik Arm, where they come together there. The creek provided one place where you could lighter materials ashore, and they started building a pier there. It was a day's travel in those days from Seward on the railroad to get to Anchorage, so it became a natural break point, if you will. There was land there to build a yard on. It was the first wide spot that you encountered after leaving Seward. 114 miles from Seward, you're climbing through mountains, hugging cliffs along Turnagain Arm; and suddenly, you get to this plateau area which Ship Creek traversed. And they, in their typical engineering fashion, laid out a beautiful city with north, south, east, west streets and created a town site and sold lots at lottery. And Anchorage was born. >> narrator: Construction of the Alaska Railroad encountered a number of challenges. Hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of earth had to be moved to be used as fill to elevate the roadbed above uneven ground and near rivers. Dozens of bridges were built over rivers and creeks but none more challenging than the arch bridge constructed over Hurricane Gulch. It spanned 384 feet and was almost 300 feet above the gulch below. It was finally completed in August 1921. With anticipation of the railroad laying tracks at least as far as Nenana, then into Fairbanks, the Alaska Engineering Commission was authorized to purchase the floundering Tanana Valley Railroad in Fairbanks. Construction of a narrow-gauge extension from Happy Crossing near the Alaska School of Mines began to the north shore of the Tanana River at Nenana. >> When they built the line from Happy down to the north bank of the Tanana River, they built it to standard gauge specifications. It must be remembered, to those who are not familiar with the Tanana Valley Railroad, that it was a 3-foot gauge. The standard gauge is 4 feet, 8 1/2 inches. So therefore, it made it much narrower than what the Alaska Railroad was. When they built that line, they went ahead and built it to standard gauge specifications. The ties were also standard gauge ties. But when they laid the track initially, they laid it on center three feet apart. So as the Alaska Railroad moved north, they gradually just spaced the rails apart. And that's how they were able to make this quick transition. >> narrator: By November of 1919, the narrow-gauge line had been completed. Without a bridge crossing the Tanana River at Nenana, northbound freight would unload onto ferries in the summer and be transferred across the Tanana River to the narrow-gauge trains that would take supplies into Fairbanks. It was a much different freight transfer operation in the winter. >> So in the wintertime, the railroad used to run its operations directly across the river on the ice, and it would come down the bank on the north shore of the Tanana River and cross over on the ice and park just about where the dock is in Nenana today. And most of the time, the trains were hauled by the smaller locomotives; but I have pictures of where the heavier locomotives were out there on the ice too. >> narrator: The last major project on the government railroad was the construction of a bridge across the Tanana River at Nenana. During 1922 and 1923, workers of the American Bridge Company spanned the Tanana River at its narrowest point with what was then the longest single-span truss bridge in North America. The line was then standard gauged all the way to Fairbanks with the narrow-gauge former Tanana Valley Railroad still operating on what was now called the Chatanika branch of the government railroad. On July 15, 1923, President Warren G. Harding drove the golden spike completing the rail link between Seward and Fairbanks at a spot just north of the bridge across the Tanana River at Nenana. With the driving of the golden spike, this ended all the major railroad construction projects in Alaska and the Yukon. Out of some 26 railroads in Alaska, northwest British Columbia, and the Yukon, little evidence exists of but a few. The first steam locomotive in Alaska that operated at the Apollo Mine on Unga Island still exists. >> Keith Christensen, an attorney in Anchorage, salvaged it from the island with a major operation back in the '70s. And currently, it is in storage in New Jersey. Being 30-inch gauge, it was one of the oddities that, as an industrial gauge, was not uncommon at that time, at the turn of the century. >> narrator: The Seward Peninsula had three railroads. The village of Council, where the boreal forest comes to an abrupt end, is where the former Wild Goose and Golovin Bay Railroad operated. Looking across a pretty forested valley from a hill near Council, one can still see portions of the railroad track where it had been spiked down over 100 years ago. In 2001, a group from the Tanana Valley Railroad in Fairbanks managed to salvage a few of the artifacts of the railroad from what used to be the engine facilities in Council. >> About three or four years ago, the scientists that were visiting Council had a film crew. And one of the members of that crew came over and was so interested in the train trucks that were in our yard. So we invited them to come and look at them, and they made a determination that they should take them to Fairbanks and restore them. And they knew what they were and were willing to turn them into authentic train trucks, part of a whole railroad. The good part about this was that our yard was going to be free of these things and that they were going to stay in Alaska to be restored and that all of us would be able to go and visit. >> narrator: Four trucks were salvaged, and the group transported them to Nome, where an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 flew them out one at a time to Anchorage, then on to Fairbanks, where two have been restored and put into service. 30 miles south of Council on the Norton Sound coast are the remains of the Council City & Solomon River Railroad, known throughout Alaska as "The Last Train to Nowhere." Three locomotives and a few flatcars and wheels sit on the tundra rusting away. The area has been made a roadside attraction by the State of Alaska Department of Transportation. Scavengers and collectors have removed most of the parts off the locomotives. >> For years, that was known as the iron supply depot for Nome. If you needed something, you'd run down there with a cutting torch and cut off the appropriate piece and haul it back to town. I think it's 12 or 13 miles down the beach there. And it's sad in one way, you know, that they've met that demise and they continue to rot away there on the beach. At this point, if somebody wanted a New York--an example of a New York elevated railway locomotive, it would be best to start from scratch and fabricate one. But preserving Alaska's railroad heritage is a challenge. >> narrator: The nearby village of Solomon, where the railroad had its repair and maintenance facilities, still exists but has few residents. In Nome and points north, portions of the Wild Goose and Seward Peninsula railroads still exist. The shifting permafrost conditions in the early days did not allow the practical use of the rigid frame steam locomotives to operate on the line. >> Oh, it'd be practically impossible to make it solid. Anything you build on permafrost is going to move. You know, it and the weight of the trains. It just isn't going to be something that's going to be stationary because of the frost, the action of the frozen ground underneath the rails. And that's why the bigger trains that they first tried to use really weren't successful. >> narrator: The old locomotives were sold and shipped out or used as riprap in the Nome seawall. Necessity became the mother of invention as miners and residents along the rail route utilized their own forms of transport to get in or out of Nome. By 1914 and into the 1920s, residents used sled dogs to pull little carts up and down the line. These were known as pupmobiles. From the 1930s into the 1950s, the gold miners took old trucks and converted them to use on the lines for hauling freight into the Kougarok mining region. >> It was all flatbed equipment. And they didn't go tremendously fast, but I guess 15 or so miles an hour when they freighted. In those days, the Alaska-- not highway but territorial-- kept the railroad up before statehood. And they had crews that went up all summer long, keeping the roadbed up. And the railroad trains were heavy enough to haul tremendously heavy tons of freight. >> narrator: Some residents utilized gasoline-powered speeders for transportation, whether to go from home to town, hunting, or berry picking. >> Going to Nome from Basin Creek, it was an all-day adventure. And, you know, it wasn't anything that you just took for granted, because lots of things could happen. Course, you could meet somebody coming the other way. And it was a long ways between where you could get off the track to let another speeder go by. And there was a lot of politicking and--you know, who had the biggest load and who was the--who had the need mostly, you know? So that was always part of this adventure. >> narrator: In the early 1950s, Charles Reeder of Nome operated a small tourist railroad called the Curly Q Railroad on a portion of the line. This he ran a few years before the Alaska Highway Department began tearing up the rails to put a road in its place. >> Well, my earliest recollection of the Curly Q was just riding on it and sitting in my dad's lap. In fact, it's one of the earliest memories I have of childhood is sitting in his lap. And it seems like there were some levers down here and some stuff in the cars kind of rocking back and forth like this; and the willows are slapping back in our face, you know. And I remember the smell of the cigar and the smell of the gas and the smell of the train and tump-tulupping down the track, clickety-clack. [train whistle blows] >> narrator: Outside of Fairbanks, what remains of the Tanana Valley Railroad takes a keen eye to pick out among the roads and trails that crisscross the valleys and hills. Nothing much remains of the 29 miles of track between Fairbanks, Chena City, and Chatanika, except portions of the roadbed. When the gold dredges were delivered piece by piece by the Tanana Valley Railroad, little did they know the dredges would chew their way into the abandoned roadbed in the 1930s. What little portion of the right of way that exists through the Goldstream Valley is used primarily in the winter as sled dog, cross country skiing, and a snow machine trail. A person traveling on what would be an ordinary sled trail suddenly comes across a railroad bridge in the middle of nowhere. [engine buzzing] The once-bustling Chena City that competed with Fairbanks for bragging rights is completely gone. And today, a campground and a boat launch is in its place. In 1992, a group of Fairbanks locals formed the Friends of the Tanana Valley Railroad and took on the challenge of restoring the first locomotive in the interior, the little Porter that began the railroad in 1904, to operating condition. They now use it on the narrow-gauge track around the Fairbanks-Northstar Boroughs historical theme park named Pioneer Park. By late 1998, in a concentrated effort, a new boiler had been manufactured in Rhode Island and delivered free of charge by a local transport company. The group began the task of reassembling the locomotive. And by the summer of 1999, on its 100th anniversary of construction, the little Porter steamed up and ran under its own power. [train whistle blows] The once-booming Dawson City, Yukon, survived into the 21st century. Today, it welcomes visitors from around the world to rediscover its historic past. In the gold mining region around Dawson, what remains of the Klondike Mines Railway is spread out over its entire 31-mile length. Klondike City went from a genuine community to nothing today. No structures or track remain, and trees have grown where streets and houses once stood. Thomas O'Brien's brewery and engine maintenance shop is nothing more than an old smokestack and a number of railroad wheels and steel around where the maintenance facility stood. Most of the 31 miles of railroad bed can be found, but it's now overgrown with trees and brush. The best-preserved portion of the Klondike Mines Railway can be found in Dawson City in a large government-funded structure. There on display are three of the four Klondike Mines Railway locomotives that are presently undergoing a cosmetic restoration. Summer visitors to Dawson can gaze upon the historic remains. >> They're--they're very popular. This--the train shed here is well-known, and lots of people are aware of the locomotives. They come and plan their visit to Dawson City so they can see the locomotives. So it's a real benefit for the tourism industry. >> narrator: By the late 1920s, there were only four significant railroads operating in Alaska and the Yukon. They were the Copper River & North Western, the Yakutat & Southern, the White Pass & Yukon Route, and the Alaska Railroad. [train chugging] The Copper River & North Western, which relied mostly on hauling copper ore from the mine at Kennecott, survived well into World War I. But labor strikes and a fluctuating copper market into the early 1920s gave way to a slump in operations. By the time the Depression of the 1930s hit, the declining demand for copper affected the corporation, and production was cut back. Many mine and railroad workers were laid off. The rich copper ore of the Kennecott region was drying up, and high maintenance costs on the railroad made the owners decide to shut down and abandon the entire 196 miles of line. The last train ran from Kennecott to Cordova on November 10 and 11, 1938. During World War II, the United States Army used gasoline- powered speeders on the rail line to haul material to construct an airfield 13 miles east of Cordova. The army then began to disassemble the railroad. >> The first of the rail went out with the U.S. Army. The army acquired the Copper River & North Western stock that was at Cordova. There was quite a few engines that had been left behind, and all the trackage up to the Million Dollar Bridge and a little beyond was still in place. They took out almost all of that rail. And by the end of the war, they had shipped out all of the rolling stock that was remaining. >> narrator: Very little of the 196 miles of railroad remains today. The mill at Kennecott became a target of salvagers. >> An enormous amount of what you can call salvage and just plain wanton destruction occurred. And the mill site was essentially stripped of just about anything of value that could be walked off. Everything from player pianos to copper wire and windows and doors and stoves and toilets; everything walked out of there. >> narrator: In 1964, the great Alaska earthquake severely damaged portions of the railroad that were being used as a highway. The Million Dollar Bridge was skewed out of place, and span number four fell into the Copper River. A temporary automobile bridge was built within the collapsed span for vehicle traffic. Today, the Million Dollar Bridge is getting a face-lift in the form of a $15 million repair job. The costly repair has sparked controversy due in large part that presently the road ends a mere mile and a half north of the bridge. >> And the whole purpose behind that is twofold, really. It's a historical monument, almost. It's a bridge that was built in 1910 for the Copper River Highway--Railroad. And the span right now fell down in 1964--fell off its mount, and it's been in the river. And it really has a potential hazard of washing away--washing into the river itself and causing some other additional problems downriver. And if it's not taken care of here at some point, you know, we won't have that span at all to deal with. And then what do you do with a bridge that has three spans with a large gap? Right now, it's crossable. But at some point, it wouldn't be crossable. >> narrator: The future, plus a massive infusion of money, will dictate whether the old railroad bed north of the Million Dollar Bridge will ever be used for a highway. What was once the most ambitious private project in Alaska's history is now just a fading memory: a few bridges, buildings, roadbed, and the photographic record. [seagulls squawking] The Yakutat & Southern Railway, built to serve a cannery, had the distinction of being the only railroad ever constructed to haul fish. Two locomotives still exist, but most of the line has been disassembled or left to the elements of nature. Portions of the fish-loading facility on Johnson's Slough at Situk remain. Two hopper cars that were pushed off the end of the tracks are slowly working their way into the slough next to rotting dock pilings. Nearby, railroad track hangs motionless and twisted where locomotives once idled. The tracks are now being consumed by ground vegetation and erosion. A hike on a forest service trail farther up the line can reveal railroad tracks still in place with trees growing up through the ties. A short walk in each direction can reveal the old roadbed and rotting bridges. [chugging] The White Pass & Yukon barely survived the post gold rush days. Copper and lead-zinc ore shipments along with tourists kept the railroad in business through the 1920s. But when the Depression hit, tourist business dried up, and freight business averaged only 12,000 tons a year. When World War II arrived in late 1941, the line suddenly could not handle all the traffic required by the U.S. Army and Canadian forces. And while consideration of a rail line between Dawson Creek, British Columbia, and Fairbanks, Alaska, was considered, the decision was made to construct the Alaska Highway as a means of getting war material and supplies to Alaska in a faster manner. The White Pass was taken over by the U.S. Army as the 770th Railway Operating Battalion and run by army officers who had worked as railroad managers in their civilian life. The railway could not keep up with the thousands of tons of supplies and material arriving in Skagway. Locomotives and rolling stock were transferred from the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad and the Colorado & Southern Railroad in Colorado, both narrow-gauge railroads. By the time the war was over and the army transferred the railroad back to White Pass management, the line was literally worn out. >> Well, they had to rebuild again after all the trains were run during the war. They had to rebuild the-- a lot of equipment was worn out. They purchased two more steam engines. They were able to purchase a lot of the military surplus equipment which was all built of steel, much--it could haul heavier tonnage than the old White Pass wooden cars. Gradually, the mineral industry in the Yukon opened up, and they're shipping lead-zinc concentrates as well as copper southbound. >> narrator: As the 1950s came about, the White Pass began its transition from steam power to diesel power. Tourist and passenger revenue increased along with freight. Lead-zinc concentrate was shipped from Whitehorse south to Skagway and loaded on ships. Supplies of food, fuel, automobiles, and building material was moving north from Skagway. In 1955, the White Pass pioneered construction of container ships. >> They developed containerization, the first containers in the world for an integrated system. The first integrated container system in the world was here through Skagway on the White Pass & Yukon Route: ship, train, to truck. Three-phase integrated transport system developed by Frank H. Brown and the White Pass Company of Vancouver started in 1954. And they were--of course, now how do we ship things worldwide? Unless you go by container, you don't go. I mean, that's how it works. >> narrator: As the 1970s were coming to a close, the Klondike Highway that paralleled the railway was finishing construction. This meant that many goods could be hauled cheaper between Skagway and Whitehorse. >> I do remember that a lot of us in the railway business were quite concerned when we saw it being built, because there has never been in the history of any railroad anywhere, a narrow gauge which was able to compete with a paralleling highway. The operating cost of a mountain narrow-gauge railroad is simply too high. So we saw this government- sponsored, funded highway being built right along beside a privately run railroad, and the clock had started ticking. >> narrator: The railway maintained its freight operations, hauling the bulk lead-zinc concentrates. Then in 1982, the world price of lead-zinc fell, and the Anvil Mine in Faro, Yukon, closed. The White Pass literally had no freight to haul and few passengers. The decision was made to board up the buildings and shut down the railroad. It was a major blow to the economies of Skagway, Whitehorse, and Carcross. Many jobs disappeared, and the railway sat, rusting away. Then in 1988, the owners of the White Pass resurrected the line to serve the growing cruise ship industry. Suddenly, there were thousands of people inundating Skagway, wanting to ride the most scenic portion of the railroad from Skagway to the White Pass summit. Today, the White Pass carries over 300,000 passengers in its summer operating season between May and September. It has all the appearances of being a healthy privately owned Canadian company. >> It's probably never been healthier. We're very fortunate, where not only our product and our history and our heritage and what we do today; but we're positioned right with being here in Skagway right at the end of the inside passage. And cruise ships keep coming here and have a great experience here in Skagway, so we're doing very well. >> narrator: The White Pass railroad itself has had a tremendous taste of success and has discovered its past is a key element to its future. >> Our past really is our future. Even though we were shut down for six years in the 1980s, by reopening and continuing on for the last 15 years, we've been able to maintain our heritage, keep our heritage, and develop on that. And I think it's very important that the largest mass movement of people in North America in a very short period of time--that that heritage is still here and around. It's something that visitors certainly take an interest in. And that's one of the reasons for our success. >> The White Pass' future is in the past, yes. This is the history. The gold rush certainly is part of the romance, traveling over the summits. A lot of people who today revisit the White Pass, their forefathers were some of the original gold seekers. So they're following their footsteps so they have a better understanding of what the early prospectors and stampeders went through when they were on their way to Dawson and the gold fields. >> narrator: The future for the White Pass & Yukon Route has never been brighter. In 1994, it was listed as an international historic civil engineering landmark. >> Today, you know, we have a real successful operation. Very, very fortunate to have a railroad that makes money and hauls a lot of people. But at the same time, if we don't keep some of our old machinery up and running, we begin to lose where we came from. And, you know, I've said this before, that you really can't move into your history without looking back in your past to see where you've come from. And I think that the steam engine, the rotary--keeping those things running, keeping them moving, using them in the operation--keeps that link alive between the past and today. And I think that you never really lose the flavor of the railroad if you keep some of that stuff with it. And so I'm for going back in the past and keeping some of this equipment and keeping it going and actually acquiring more and restoring it. >> narrator: After the golden spike was driven on the Alaska Railroad, things settled down to a pace of maintenance and upgrade on the 470-mile line from Seward to Fairbanks. As a government-owned railroad, it wasn't required to turn a profit. >> I really think you got to go back to the roots of the Alaska Railroad to see why that was. And because we were federally owned, the railroad got a budget, basically. They were issued a budget. They didn't earn that money. They were issued it every year. Of course, they tried to sell tickets and, you know, get some money back; but it was never really to necessarily make a profit so much as it was to support travel in the interior of Alaska where there weren't a lot of roads. >> narrator: In the 1920s and 1930s, the Alaska Railroad expanded into the tourist business. >> Along the route of the railroad, it owned several hotels. It had the Curry Resort, which was up at milepost 258, which was a very beautiful resort. President Harding, when he came up here in 1923 to drive the golden spike, he and that party stayed there. And it was one of the unique resorts, because many of the wealthy people from the lower 48 states would come up to go hunting and fishing, you know, in the summer and the fall. And they'd come up to go skiing in the winter. It would be like going on an African safari, but they'd come to the Territory of Alaska. >> narrator: As an entity of the Department of the Interior, it was also able to construct and run a hotel at the entrance of Mount McKinley National Park. The only access to McKinley Park in the early years was the Alaska Railroad; and tourists would come by rail, stay in the hotel, and tour the park road. The railroad turned the hotel over to the National Park Service in 1953. In 1971, disaster struck, and the Mount McKinley National Park Hotel burned to the ground. >> So we went into action to help the park service. We had some old troop sleepers that were sitting out on the-- in the yard here, and we quickly refurbished them for them, and we built tracks up to that portion of the hotel that did not burn. And there were like, I think, about six tracks, and we had about--I think there were about ten cars. So the interesting part about that is the fact that there would be certain cars on certain tracks, and the tourists absolutely loved it. This was supposed to be a temporary measure until the park service was to rebuild the hotel. >> narrator: Throughout the early years of operation, the Alaska Railroad expanded its transportation base by purchasing and operating stern-wheelers that plied the drainages of the Tanana, Koyukuk, and Yukon from the rail port in Nenana. When World War II broke out, the U.S. Army's 714th Railway Operating Battalion took over the railroad during the war. >> The railroad employees that were here still worked here, but they actually reported to the military officers that were operating. >> narrator: The railroad carried millions of tons of war material and building supplies into Anchorage and Fairbanks for the construction and operation of military installations. >> The traffic on the railroad doubled, quadrupled. You have to realize it was pretty much a Sleepy Hollow before 1939. And when the surge came, getting the railroad up to standards to handle the increased volume and then bringing equipment on-- fortunately they did bring on some consolidations, the wartime consolidations. The crews called them the Gypsy Rose Lee locomotives, because they were stripped down for action. >> narrator: Like the White Pass Railroad, after the war, the Alaska Railroad was literally worn out. Congress stepped in with an infusion of $60 million in funding for maintenance. >> When the Congress appropriated that $60 million to replace all the ties and rails and ballast, it was basically running like a new railroad, you know, for a few years. But then that slowly wore itself down as it was still earning money, because it was the major transportation route, and it was doing well. It was existing. It was paying its employees. The interesting part about those times is that the railroad had its own hospital, had its own commissary. There were periods of time when the railroad didn't have enough money to pay its employees. But the employees didn't go hungry because the railroad had its own commissary, so they gave food to its employees and their families. And it had housing for its employees as well. It was kind of like a family- owned and run business. >> narrator: In the late 1940s, the Cold War was beginning to heat up, and Alaska still had large military installations accessible by rail in Anchorage and Fairbanks. Congress appropriated funding to continue upgrades to the railroad. And by the late 1950s, the railroad fully dieselized, selling off or scrapping its steam locomotives. In 1964, the largest earthquake to hit North America, the 9.2- magnitude Great Alaska Earthquake caused $30 million in damage, mostly in Seward, Whittier, Valdez, and Anchorage. 115 people were killed and many more injured as a result of the quake. Most businesses and services were severely affected, and the Alaska Railroad was no exception. For the first time ever, the Alaska Railroad literally shut down as the resulting tsunami swept into Seward, destroying all the facilities there. And farther north in Portage, the shaking ground and land subsidence reduced the track to ribbons. In a concentrated effort by construction crews, three weeks after the quake, the railroad was back up and operating on a limited schedule. In the 1970s, the railroad hauled a majority of the 48-inch pipe between Whittier and Fairbanks used in the construction of the 800-mile Trans-Alaska oil pipeline. Even a small portion of the Alaska Railroad was constructed in Valdez for processing of the pipe. >> During the construction of the pipeline, they would bring in 40-foot sections of pipe in various thicknesses and dimensions and then join them into 80-foot sections and put them through the pipe-coating plant in Valdez, and then they would load them onto railcars--80-foot railcars, and they had a couple of little locomotives, one of which we have at the transportation museum in Valdez. They would use these little locomotives, and they had a switching yard built in the old town site at Valdez, and they would load those flatcars with the pipe loads on board barges, take them across Prince William Sound to Whittier, put them on the Alaska Railroad, and then haul them north to Fairbanks so that they could feed the pipeline from several directions. >> narrator: Today, the Alaska Railroad is as modern as any of its counterparts in the lower 48 and Canada. It still must contend with temperature extremes, snow slides and landslides, permafrost, and earthquakes. And while all railroads in the lower 48 and Canada have all eliminated their once popular passenger service, the Alaska Railroad has embraced passenger service year-round and continues to build upon it. It contracts with private tour companies to haul its coaches behind its regular passenger trains and turns a profit in the process. >> Now, we do that two ways. One, we provide our own rail service with Alaska Railroad cars and then sell tickets for Alaska Railroad seats. But as business and entrepreneurs come up and look at opportunities, we do the same thing for the cruise companies too so that it links the ship to the train to the plane and gone in a flow of tourists. And we took advantage of that in the Alaska Railroad as part of our business. And, of course, we still do that today. I don't foresee a time, I don't foresee an initiative-- at least, not on my watch-- to ever even stand up and suggest that we should optimize for freight, for example, and divest ourselves of all the baggage, if you will, and the freight of handling passengers, as the other railroads have done. >> narrator: Passengers on a typical Alaska Railroad trip between Fairbanks and Anchorage enjoy the luxurious scenery from 1950s dome cars and newer observation cars. It has proven to be popular among passengers. Mount McKinley National Park became Denali National Park in 1980. And today, the Alaska Railroad continues to be a vital transportation link, even with the George Parks Highway paralleling the tracks between Fairbanks and Anchorage. At the Denali Park depot, the railroad has upgraded its waiting facilities for its passengers, as it sees two passenger trains daily. The railroad still provides a passenger service between Talkeetna and Hurricane so residents far removed from the highway system can access their homesteads. With the increasing population in and around the Anchorage and Wasilla-Palmer area, the Alaska Railroad has invited commercial railcar builders to demonstrate their small self-propelled passenger trains in hopes that a commuter rail system between Wasilla and Anchorage could be in place in the future. >> But if we really want to fulfill our destiny in terms of moving Alaskans from the areas where they decided to live in towns that have grown up like the valley in Wasilla and Palmer--moving to and from both places at work and recreation in good numbers--we've got to have more flexibility in our equipment. >> narrator: The big revenue for the railroad is freight. The Alaska Railroad daily hauls fuel from the Flint Hills Refinery in North Pole to the fuel-thirsty economy of Anchorage. Besides liquid fuel, the railroad annually hauls millions of tons of coal from the Usibelli Coal Mine in Healy. Unit trains travel from the loading tipple in Healy south to Seward, where it is processed and reloaded onto oceangoing ships that dock in the port of Seward and transport the low-sulphur coal to Korea, where it's fed into power plants. Northbound coal trains from Healy feed the power plants at Clear Air Force Station, the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, Aurora Energy downtown, and the military power plants on Fort Wainwright and Eielson Air Force Base. Freight of a general nature is hauled from Whittier and Seward to Anchorage and Fairbanks in boxcars or on flatcars with piggyback semi trailers known as an intermodal train. These intermodal trains with two-man crews can haul in one trip what 100 truckers over the highways typically can haul. Some believe a government- subsidized railroad is unfair competition with private industry in Alaska. >> Is it competition? Yes. Is it unfair competition? I think today particularly the answer still remains No, it's not. And the reason why is because of what we move and what we choose not to move. We don't move what truckers do best. Truckers do just in time better than the railroad could ever do. At the same time, when we haul 4 million tons of gravel, the thought of hauling 4 million tons of gravel over the Glenn Highway back and forth from Wasilla in trucks is a pretty scary thought. That's a lot of truckloads on a very busy highway. >> narrator: Today, the Alaska Railroad continues to upgrade its mainline and facilities with the infusion of federal dollars. The most ambitious project on the drawing board is an extension of the line from Eielson Air Force Base near Fairbanks to the National Missile Defense Project at Fort Greely near the agricultural rich farmland of Delta Junction. From Delta, there are plans to extend the main line over 1,000 miles into the Yukon and British Columbia to link up with Canadian National Railway's subsidiary, BC Rail, in Fort Nelson or the completed BC Rail roadbed in Dease Lake. >> Well, the whole idea of expanding the railroad, whether it's the Canadians or whether it's a railroad here in Alaska, I think, has some underlying fundamental principles that have to be met to be successful. Or just like the early railroad that started out of Seward, you can pump as much capital as you've got into a railroad, and it'll take it all; but you're not going to pay for it. >> narrator: And what is the future for the the Alaska Railroad? >> The railroad is going to continue to do what it's doing now: try to do it better, more efficient. There's potential connections to Canada. There's potential connections west to Nome. There's been really visionary projects conceived that would go over to Russia to make a transcontinental link between the North American continent and Russia. The future for the Alaska Railroad is as wide as anyone can think of.
