White Pass and Yukon Route — heritage railway
Gary Bembridge from London, UK · CC BY 2.0

White Pass and Yukon Route

  • 2 min read
  • 59.625° N 135.138° W

Interesting facts

  • On 21 July 1898 an excursion train carried passengers four miles out of Skagway, the first train ever to run in Alaska.
  • The railway was paid for largely by British investors brought together by the London merchant bank Close Brothers.
  • The three-foot narrow gauge was chosen by the contractor Michael James Heney, the railway builder who drove the line over the pass.
  • Company president Samuel H. Graves chaired the vigilante committee opposed to the con man Soapy Smith, who was shot dead on Skagway's Juneau Wharf in July 1898.
  • In October 1942 the US Army leased the line, and its 770th Railway Operating Battalion ran the trains until civilian control returned in late 1944.
  • Wartime traffic peaked on 4 August 1943, when 38 trains moving 3,346 gross short tons crossed the pass in a single day.
  • The company was an early pioneer of intermodal freight, introducing shipping containers in 1956 alongside its own container ship, the Clifford J. Rogers.
  • The oldest parlor cars still in use were built in 1881, nineteen years before the railway itself was completed.
  • An original steam-powered rotary snowplow survives and is run once or twice a winter for groups of railway enthusiasts.
  • Several retired White Pass steam locomotives now haul visitors far from Alaska, at Dollywood in Tennessee and the Tweetsie Railroad in North Carolina.

Why it is worth it

The White Pass and Yukon Route was built in a hurry for gold and has outlived the rush by more than a century. When the Klondike stampede began in 1897, prospectors landing at Skagway in Alaska faced a brutal climb over the Coast Mountains to reach the Yukon headwaters. Construction of a narrow-gauge railway over the White Pass began in May 1898, the summit was reached in February 1899, and the ceremonial golden spike was driven on 29 July 1900, completing a line of about 110 miles to Whitehorse in 26 months. From tidewater the track gains almost 3,000 feet in about 20 miles, on grades of up to 3.9 percent, clinging to ledges cut into granite with the help of some 450 tons of explosives.

The line kept the Yukon supplied for decades, carrying ore, freight and passengers, until falling metal prices and mine closures stopped it in October 1982. It returned in May 1988 as a heritage railway, and today its trains climb from Skagway to the summit and on to Fraser, Bennett and Carcross. In 1994 it was named an International Historic Civil Engineering Landmark, an honour it shares with works such as the Panama Canal and the Eiffel Tower.

What the traveller sees is the reason the railway is famous. Within twenty miles of leaving the sea the track has to reach the summit, so the climb out of Skagway is relentless: the line clings to the mountainside on shelves blasted from the rock, turns on curves of up to 16 degrees and dives through a short tunnel near Mile 16. At Dead Horse Gulch the railway built a steel cantilever bridge in 1901 that was then the tallest of its kind in the world; a newer tunnel took over its job in 1969. At the summit the train reaches the Canada-US border, and beyond it the route runs on into Canada towards Bennett and Carcross, the way the gold seekers went.

Getting there

Trains depart from Skagway, Alaska, a cruise port; Whitehorse, the capital of Yukon, is about 120 km from the line in a straight line and is served by Erik Nielsen Whitehorse International Airport (YXY), roughly the same distance. The nearest airport of any kind, at Haines (HNS), about 48 km away, lies across open water from Skagway. The railway runs combined bus-and-train trips between Whitehorse and Skagway, as well as summit excursions and longer journeys from Skagway to Bennett and Carcross.

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in British Columbia 12The Most Beautiful Places in Canada 43The Greatest Engineering Wonders in Canada 5The Most Beautiful Heritage Railways 12The Greatest Engineering Wonders 271

From the encyclopaedia

The White Pass and Yukon Route is a Canadian and U.S. Class III 3 ft narrow-gauge railroad linking the port of Skagway, Alaska, with Whitehorse, the capital of Yukon. An isolated system, it has no direct connection to any other railroad. Equipment, freight and passengers are ferried by ship through the Port of Skagway, and via road through a few of the stops along its route.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

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