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Sea to Sky Gold Rush Route Guide to the Scenic Railway of the White Pass
The Sea to Sky Gold Rush Route Guide to the Scenic Railway of the White Pass By Eric Johnson
Soft Cover
Copyright 1998
90 pages Map Photos Description by miles.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction iv
Mileposts of the White Pass & Yukon Route 1
The Story of the White Pass & Yukon Route 59
People of Today's White Pass & Yukon Route77
Equipment of Today's White Pass & Yukon Route83
MAPS
Mile 0 to Mile 10 3
Mile 10 to Mile 20 19
Three Crossings of Cut-off Gulch28
Mile 20 to Mile 42 - White Pass to Bennett 45
Skagway to Whitehorse 58
Routes to the Klondike - 1898 60
The White Pass (properly known as the railway of the White Pass & Yukon Route, but commonly referred to as the "White Pass railway", or its acronym WP&YR) is one of the most colourful pieces of trackage in North America, from both a historic and a scenic viewpoint. Built as part of a transportation system which would serve the developing Klondike goldfield and open up the Yukon Territory, it is one of the best known and most tangible remnants of the last great gold rush, the Klondike rush of 1898.
Known by most as The White Pass, the railway has been dubbed a gold rush narrow gauge; the gold rush was the stampede of men into the Klondike where the greatest placer gold deposit of all time had just been discovered, and narrow gauge refers t( any railway where the distance between the rails is less than that seen on standard gauge lines.
In North America most narrow gauge railways have rails laid with the rail heads spaced 36 inches apart. Compared to standard gauge railways which have rails spaced at 561/2 inches, narrow gauge railways can be built with tighter curves, narrower cuts, and steeper grades, and rolling stock is smaller and lighter-all contributing to lower construction and outfitting costs, and to suitability for crossing the forbidding coastal mountains of south-eastern Alaska and north-western British Columbia. When the White Pass was being planned in 1898, a number of 36-inch gauge lines across the United States had already been converted to standard-gauge and there was then a surplus of used equipment available at bargain prices. Because of the isolation of the route, no consideration for interchange with standard gauge railways was given, and combined with the company's limited funding, "slim gauge" was a logical choice.
The 110-mile line-Skagway, Alaska, to Whitehorse, Yukon-was completed in 1900, and the railway operated continuously until 1982 when a recession forced the owners to mothball the railway. With the rise of tourism in the late 1980s, the railway was resuscitated-albeit as a summer-only, passenger-only, operation at first utilizing only the southern twenty miles of trackage. By 1998, traffic had increased to the point where excursions extend to Carcross at mile 67, with hopes for extension right to Whitehorse by the year 2000.
In 1994 the railway of the White Pass and Yukon Route was honoured by the Canadian Society for Civil Engineering and the American Society of Civil Engineers, ranking the railway along with only fourteen other international engineering landmarks such as the Panama Canal, the Quebec Bridge, and the Statue of Liberty-a tribute to the men that financed, engineered, and built the railway.
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