Engineering Wonders of the World
Volume I

THE WHITE PASS AND YUKON RAILWAY. 29 the construction trains for the conveyance of themselves and their goods that there was danger of a serious accident, Overworked and it therefore became neces- Trains. sary to attempt some sort of a public train service over the unfinished line, though this interfered greatly with the movements of the construction trains and with the work of the construction gangs. Nevertheless, the first train reached Lake Bennett on July 6, 1899, and 40 miles of railway through the mountains connected the navigable waters of the Pacific with those of the Yukon. The nature of the work between Skaguay and Lake Bennett added immensely to the difficulty of construction during an Arctic winter. After leaving the gravel flat at Skaguay, the line follows rocky mountain- sides deeply serrated by fissures and canyons, and in many places so steep and inaccessible that the men had to be suspended by ropes while establishing working platforms. From the fourth to the twenty-eighth mile the road bed had to be blasted out of the solid granite mountain-sides, except where bridges occurred, and every ton of ballast had to be hauled from the gravel flat at Skaguay, as there was no loose gravel or soil available for ballasting on the rocky sides of the mountains. A 500-foot tunnel on the sixteenth mile, Difficult high up on the slippery side Engineering, of Tunnel Mountain, was in- accessible from the grade line, being cut off by a deep canyon, which was not bridged till after the tunnel was completed ; and meanwhile the powder, steam-drills, fuel, and water required for work on the tunnel had to be carried on men’s backs up the steep mountain by a zigzag trail cut in the precipitous granite for that purpose. Snow to a depth of from 25 to 30 feet had to be removed from the more exposed portions of the line, and even in sheltered places the snow was from 6 to 7 feet deep. Upwards of 500,000 cubic yards of snow and ice had to be removed in clearing the line for work. Sixty-seven bridges, aggregating 11,540 feet, had to be built, many of them over deep, inaccessible canyons. Taking the engineering and climatic difficul- ties into account, a year was a remarkably short time in which to complete the 40 miles of line through the mountains from Skaguay to Lake Bennett. From this lake there is a continuous water- way down the Yukon River to its mouth, at St. Michaels, nearly 2,500 miles distant, and by means of the sundry lakes and tributary rivers there is The , . ... Waterway water communication with , of the practically the whole of the Yukon River interior of the Yukon Territory and Alaska. But this waterway is only avail- able for comparatively small boats bound down-stream, as neither Miles Canyon nor the adjacent White Horse Rapids are navigable by boats of any considerable size, and the rapids are too swift to admit of any boat that has once gone down them being got back again, even with ropes and steam capstans. Hence for all commercial purposes the head of naviga- tion on the Yukon commences at the foot of White Horse Rapids, and it was necessary to extend the railway to that point, a distance of 75 miles from Lake Bennett. Work was accordingly at once commenced on this line. The line along the shore of the lake for 27 miles involved a great deal of heavy rock work, upon which progress would be slow, so it was decided to establish camps for the rock gangs only along this part of the line, and to transfer the remainder of the working force to the foot of Lake Bennett, and put them to work between Caribou Cross- ing and White Horse Rapids. If this latter portion of some 45 miles could be completed by the time navigation opened in 1900, the lake would form a connecting link between the two pieces of railway until the gap could be closed by completing the railway along the