White Pass & Yukon-Skagway 41 years ago (9)

Since I was a boy, I had heard and been fascinated by one of the ways to get to the Alaskan interior; take your vehicle on the ferry up the Inside Passage to Skagway and load it on a flatcar on the White Pass & Yukon Railway to take to Whitehorse in Canada's Yukon Territory (while you road in the coach) where you would join the Alaska Highway. When Jack roped me in to going with him the pieces all fell in place.

What we did not know (and they say there is no God!) was that the long contemplated highway from Skagway up to Carcross in the Yukon had in fact just been completed and was ready for its first full summer of use. I still do not know why the ticket agent down south sold us the ticket. He did not know much about the service based on something I'll tell later. But sell us the tickets he did, two coach passenger tickets and a flatcar for a 1972 Datsun pickup (which leaked on the passenger side). As near as I can tell, the railroad was not really thinking about carrying vehicles anymore. We may have been the last one. We didn't know any better. It was glorious.

Just to be clear, my memory may not exceptional, but for one of the few times in my life, I kept a journal.

We had camped across the Skagway River with about two dozen other rigs, all people who had come down the highway from Carcross, which is how we found out about it. It is now called the Klondike Highway, but it was so new I have no mention of that name for it, apparently if its name had been chosen it hadn't yet stuck.

Sunday, May 20, 1979, we arose at 6 a.m., loaded our gear and headed for the White Pass loading dock to be there at 7 as we had been told. No one showed up. We waited. Still no one. No person, no train. So we watched the White Pass switch the ore dock (post 8) and eventually we walked around, took some pictures and had breakfast:




These buildings show up some 40 years earlier in Martin Hansen's post today on Trainorders (he posts here, too, as LOGGERHOGGER). His post has WP&Y #56 steaming in front down the tracks that were still in the street. Mine is in color. You choose. Both the Alaska Brotherhood Hall and the Golden North Hotel are still carrying the same name. The WP&Y depot, which in 1979 had become the National Park Service headquarters, is across the street, and I came away with only pictures of its rear (next to the tracks).

Two other items looking abandoned and needing attention (the union hall hasn't been painted for a while, either):



And that will be all I can show you of Skagway in 1979. As I've mentioned, getting passengers over the hill would now be lost to the highway in buses along with the freight to trucks -except the ore. That didn't look like enough to keep the railroad alive. So since everyone new it would soon be history, the mining folks would apply for permission to use their trucks on the road, too, and it would be granted in 1986. The White Pass would shut down, for all intents and purposes dead.

But this day in 1979, it is alive and will be hauling freight, with a few passengers including Jack and me, and a Datsun pickup.

You should have been there. I'd go again in a heartbeat.

Timothy



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 05/23/2020 04:54PM by heatermason.