The Golden Spike Ceremony was held on July 15 in Nenana to celebrate the 100-year anniversary of completing the mainline track of the Alaska Railroad.

Celebrating 100 Years

Alaska Railroad began with a gold rush and proved vital to Alaska’s growth

By David A. James

hundred years in Alaska is significant,” Clark Hopp says, remarking on the centennial anniversary of the Alaska Railroad. “There’s not a lot of things in Alaska that are a hundred years old. So that milestone is always a chance to stand and look back, think about what you’ve done, and think about how you’re moving forward.”

Looking backward while planning forward is precisely what the railroad has been doing this year, says Hopp, chief operating officer with the Alaska Railroad Corporation, or ARRC. The railroad, he stresses, has been and will continue to be a vital link in Alaska’s economic development. At this summer’s public celebration in Nenana marking the anniversary, Hopp recalls, “I think it was said several times from the stage that nothing big has ever happened in Alaska in construction and transportation that hasn’t involved the Alaska Railroad.”

Hopp was part of a large assemblage that gathered in Interior Alaska on July 15, 100 years to the day after then-President Warren Harding drove the golden spike that tied together rail lines running south from Fairbanks and north from Seward, officially bringing the Alaska Railroad into operation.

“We had about 800 dignitaries, local citizens, residents from around the state of Alaska, visitors, and actually, twenty engineers from Canada and Europe that came to celebrate with us that day,” ARRC External Affairs Director Christy Terry recalls. And while visitors came from around the world, she explains that it was a fully Alaskan event, and that both the City of Nenana and the Nenana Native Association were vital to its success. “We are very proud of having a community-centric celebration,” she adds.

“Christy did a fantastic job,” Hopp says. “It was an unbelievable event.”

Secretary of the Interior John Barton Payne; Josephus Daniels, secretary of the Navy; and Rear-Admiral Hugh Rodman arrive in Seward on an inspection trip of the government-owned railroad and coal fields, dated July 15, 1920.

The Alaska Railroad has a unique history. Alaska had only been granted territorial status two years earlier when Congress authorized funds in 1914 to build a line from the shore to the Interior. The then-recent Gold Rush had highlighted the need for moving supplies and people across the vast landscape and the difficulties involved with building any kind of transportation infrastructure on Alaska’s rough and often problematic terrain. Hopp says the completion of the railroad in 1923 was an accomplishment “that would challenge us today.”

The Alaska Railroad began carrying passengers and freight between Seward and Fairbanks that year and has done so ever since. A second line coming north from Whittier and through Anchorage was operational by 1944. The Alaska Railroad was owned by the federal government until 1983, when it passed into state hands and was placed under the oversight of the quasi-public, self-funding ARRC.

“Of all the instrumentalities that the state has, we are probably the one with the most independence,” says Brian Lindamood, ARRC vice president and chief engineer. “When they created us, I think that was critical because they recognized that we needed to be able to react in a fairly dynamic transportation market. We take that responsibility very seriously.”

Lindamood says that responsibility is larger than many Alaskans might realize.

“Between Anchorage and Fairbanks, we haul roughly 50 percent of the freight in that corridor, back and forth.” Among the items he listed are cement, fuel, oil field equipment, hospital supplies, bicycles, toilet paper, and more.

“We haul almost 200 trucks worth of stuff out of Whittier every week,” Lindamood says. “It’s not the vegetables that have to get here fast, but it’s the stuff that people want.”

A photo of a locomotive taken in front of the downtown Anchorage Railroad Depot in 1964 shows the original paint scheme of the passenger rail cars.

It’s not just Alaska consumers who depend on the railroad. Contractors would be unable to finish some projects without its carrying capacity. Lindamood cites the railroad’s role in bringing cement to Fairbanks for the upgrade of the Chena Dam and blades for the wind farm in Ferry as examples of freight that only the railroad has the ability to move in Alaska. He stresses that, within the state government, ARRC is housed within the Department of Commerce, Community, and Economic Development—not Transportation—and this indicates how the railroad sees itself functioning in Alaska.

“We are here to support and foster the development of the state,” he says.

That development comes in many ways. Along with freight, the railroad also carries passengers, which not only provides Alaskans a transportation option that is used more often than one might think, Hopp says, but it also helps support Alaska’s tourism industry. According to Hopp, this makes ARRC “the last full-service railroad in North America. We’re the last railroad that runs both passenger and freight operations. That in itself is pretty neat.”

Hopp acknowledges that Alaska “is a very tough place to run a railroad.” Even before climate change added to its headaches, maintenance was challenging: permafrost melt, glacial flow increases, and other problems. Lindamood says in recent years four bridges have developed foundation issues due to warming soil. Two have been replaced and work on the third is underway. Permafrost underlies much of the track in the Interior, he says, “And yeah, it’s melting. But it’s been honestly melting since the railroad was built. We’re continuing to work with ways to keep things stabilized over the long term.”

Expansion plans include completing the 32-mile Port MacKenzie Rail Extension project and hopefully building the long-envisioned 80-mile Northern Rail Extension from Eielson Air Force Base to Delta Junction. Lindamood cites both as examples of how ARRC is key to further development in Alaska.

Many feats of engineering, such as construction of the Hurricane Gulch Bridge in 1921, were intregal to this year’s 100-year anniversary of connecting the north and south ends of the rail.

“We are really proud of it,” Hopp says of the 100th anniversary.

“And when I say we, I mean the 780 employees. And there’s a fair number of those employees who were here for the 75th anniversary. So, there’s a lot of loyalty, a lot of pride at the Alaska Railroad about what we do here. We wouldn’t have made it a hundred years without all of those employees,” he says, noting that he means all of the employees who have worked at the railroad in the past century. “This place only works because of the people who work at it.”