White Pass and Yukon Railway, Skagway, Alaska, and Whitehorse, Yukon – 1994
![]() LOCATION: Between Skagway, Alaska, United States and Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada BACKGROUND: The discovery of gold on August 17th, 1896, at Bonanza Creek in the Yukon, started the Klondike gold rush of 1897. Thousands took ships to Skagway, made their way up through either the Chilkoot or the White Passes to Lake Bennett and from there, by water, to Dawson – the centre of the goldfields.
From sea level, at Skagway, the line climbs 2900 ft. (884m) in 20 miles (32km) to the USA-Canada border at Summit Lake at an average grade of 2.6%. The maximum grade was 3.9% and the maximum curvature 16o. Most of the route was above the tree line in the midst of recorded snowfalls of 35 ft. (11m) and winter temperatures of -65oF. (-60oC). At Dead Horse Gulch a 215 ft. (66m) high steel cantilever bridge, the highest, most northerly of its type in the world, was constructed. The Second World War saw the operation of the line taken over by the US Army and used, primarily, to serve the construction of the Alaska Highway and the North-West Staging Route airfields. At this time a 4 in. (102mm) diameter oil pipeline was built parallel to the railway to serve the Yukon. Following the war, the development of silver, zinc and lead mines in Canada and a financial restructuring, led to the development of an integrated transportation system. An interesting outgrowth of this was the introduction of the world’s first containerized freight handling. Containers were used to transport ore: they were loaded at the mines and shipped to smelters via rail and sea. Sea transport was by the world’s first container ship the Clifford J. Rogers. |