Rail to Alaska?

[p&sr]

Several of these places listed have some railroads at other track gauges than their main one.

Yes, like the USA where "Narrow Gauge" remains popular for Tourist Trains in many places.

In San Francisco (at the corner of Market & Powell), there are four different systems... BART, Light-Rail [subway], Heritage Streetcar, and Cable Cars... using three different gauges...

BART is 5' 6"

Cable Cars are 3' 6"

 

[George Harris]

How wide is our American track gauge which it came from the width of horse chariot?

This little tale is in the Urban Legend category. For many years track gauge was whatever the individual railroad builder felt like it ought to be, and could be anything from around three feet up to six feet or sometimes more.

 

[Guest]

Come on down and visit the Snow Birds and other Floridians in August! Come to think of it the Snow Birds are closer to Alaska then.Seriously, I would LOOOOVE to visit Alaska by rail!

Me too, but I'm wondering if rail wouldn't have the same problems as the AlCan highway - having to be rebuilt every

spring? It's such a long way that a rail trip would have to travel rapidly, and if the tracks sagged and dropped away each

spring like parts of the highway do, it could make for a long, uncomfortable, maybe dangerous ride.

 

[jackal]

Well, there are tracks as far north as a couple of the Princes (George and Rupert, maybe?), and those are in the same areas as some of the highways that encounter the problems you mentioned, so if they can be maintained to safe standards, I'm sure tracks north of that wouldn't be too much of a problem.

 

[Green Maned Lion]

At incredible expense, you can make pretty much anything structurally sound across anywhere and practically forever. Its quite simple in concept- piers/pillars drilled 100 feet down into bedrock and wet-cemented in. 100 feet into bedrock, mind you, might mean digging through 2000 feet of ice and muck.

Sitting somewhere on my hard drive is my plans for a home if I ever get the chance to build it. The design premise is that it should be able to withstand a 8.0 earthquake AND a F5 or Class 5 storm at the same time, require absolutely no maintenance to its structure for 300 years, and be absolutely fire proof to outside sources. I figure it would cost about 2 million dollars to build it as a 3200 sq-ft structure with minimal depth. Why? I have this thing for over-engineered, over-built things. I don't know why THAT is.

 

[Joel N. Weber II]

Does New Jersey ever see either an F5 storm or an 8.0 earthquake?

I think the really important thing in the northeast is just to make sure you pick a location that isn't vulnerable to flooding (both by assuming that the sea level may rise somewhat over the years, and paying attention to where the rivers are and where they will flood in heavy rainfall or snow melting). Then you could use the money you save by having a more cost effective house for a private railroad car, and/or to bribe Giordano's to open a restaurant in New Jersey.

With any vehicle, there are significant weight issues if you want to built it solidly enough to last forever with no maintenance.

 

[Green Maned Lion]

Does New Jersey ever see either an F5 storm or an 8.0 earthquake?
I think the really important thing in the northeast is just to make sure you pick a location that isn't vulnerable to flooding (both by assuming that the sea level may rise somewhat over the years, and paying attention to where the rivers are and where they will flood in heavy rainfall or snow melting). Then you could use the money you save by having a more cost effective house for a private railroad car, and/or to bribe Giordano's to open a restaurant in New Jersey.

With any vehicle, there are significant weight issues if you want to built it solidly enough to last forever with no maintenance.

If I ever build it, it will be in the most remote, unreachable place I can think of. If I have the money needed to build it, I don't have any need to earn more money, no need to go to any sort of job, and I can finally have the solitude I often crave. And when Marx's predictions come true, I'll be nicely out of harms way.

 

[bobbyj]

May I add my 2 1/2 cents worth to this discussion?

The former British Columbia Railway graded a ROW north from Prince George a few years ago, but money became a problem. At the same time they were running out of money, the U.S. denied permission to the Alaska Railroad to build a connection to the BC line.

The BCR was going to build to Whitehorse, the Yukon territory and the Alaska railroad was to build from Anchorage east to the border, with one of them building a connection.

The Canadian National has a track from Jasper to Prince George to Prince Rupert, (one can ride VIA's Skeena)

and take ferries from there to ports in Alaska.

If you like nice scenery--ride the White Pass and Yukon out of Juneau sometime! It, at one time, ran to Whitehorse.

 

[the_traveler]

If you like nice scenery--ride the White Pass and Yukon out of Juneau sometime! It, at one time, ran to Whitehorse.

You will wait a long time to ride the White Pass & Yukon in Juneau. Especially since it departs from Skagway! (And besides - Juneau is surrounded on 3 sides by glaciers and on the 4th side by the Inside Passage!)

 

[George Harris]

The former British Columbia Railway graded a ROW north from Prince George a few years ago, but money became a problem. At the same time they were running out of money, the U.S. denied permission to the Alaska Railroad to build a connection to the BC line. The BCR was going to build to Whitehorse, the Yukon territory and the Alaska railroad was to build from Anchorage east to the border, with one of them building a connection.

Not saying it isn't so, but I never heard any of this before. The BCRR graded what was called the Dease Lake extension, with the possible final destination of Alaska, but it never got so far as rails being laid, and the "few years" is somewhere over 30 years ago. I think maybe even as far back as the 1950's

An Anchorage end connection to the ARR would be totally impractical if anyone looks at the terrain. There have been studies to connect Alaska and BC, but they have mostly aimed for somewhere around Fairbanks on the Alaska end. The oldest serious study was one done during WW2 for building of a railroad instead of the Alaska Highway.

 

[jackal]

An Anchorage end connection to the ARR would be totally impractical if anyone looks at the terrain. There have been studies to connect Alaska and BC, but they have mostly aimed for somewhere around Fairbanks on the Alaska end. The oldest serious study was one done during WW2 for building of a railroad instead of the Alaska Highway.

Plus, things are slightly different now than they were when these older studies were being done--the ARR's connection between Fairbanks and Delta Junction, which is about maybe a third of the way between Fairbanks and the Canadian border, is almost a done deal--I don't think anything's going to stop it now. Besides the shorter distance, the terrain between Delta and the border is FAR less challenging than over the Chugach Mountains between Palmer (just north of Anchorage) and Glennallen (the route the Glenn Highway travels on).

If passenger service ever materializes, routing through Fairbanks will add about 15 hours to journeys from Anchorage to the Lower 48, but it'll also make for a faster run across to Russia if the tunnel ever gets built...(a pipe dream, but...)

 

[George Harris]

For the location of the WW2 era survey for the railroad to Alaska, at least as it goes across the Yukon Territory, go here:

www.emr.gov.yk.ca/minimg/pdf/yukon_advanced_exploration_projects_2007_12x17.pdf

It is a large file: 7.7 MB

It shows the line as running, from British Columbia boundary to Alaska boundary,

Watson Lake - Ross River - Carmacks - Moosehorn. It passes about 140 km north of Whithorse.

From the look of this, Dease Lake would be about 120 to 150 km more or less straight south of Watson Lake. Fort Nelson, where the active north end of the BCR is located would be somewhere between twice to 2.5 times as far. I'll look at the Alaska end later.

The site, www.emr.gov.yk.ca/mining/mapsdatapubs.html#Maps has several other interesting maps, as well.

 

[adkkev]

From http://www.emr.gov.yk.ca/oilandgas/pipelin...astructure.html

"Rail System

The White Pass and Yukon Route (WP&YR) railway narrow gauge railroad was completed in 1901. There are 170 kilometres of track between Whitehorse and Skagway, Alaska, however, operations to Whitehorse were halted in 1982 following mine closures. Starting in May 2007 a new all-Canadian route Tourist Passenger Service will operate between Carcross, Yukon and historic Bennett, B.C. There are no plans to resume freight operations.

The Yukon government recently committed to contribute $3 million toward a joint feasibility study with Alaska to build a rail link from Alaska through Yukon and into northern British Columbia. Such a railway would provide benefits to Yukon and Canada and would support key industries in the North such as oil and gas, mining and tourism"

 

[George Harris]

The Yukon government recently committed to contribute $3 million toward a joint feasibility study with Alaska to build a rail link . . .

If they decide to do something besides study, call me. Otherwise it is simply another waste of time and money. If one percent of the studies that have already been done turned into reality, we would be putting some serious money into railroads. Right now all that money is being put into is appeasement of those that want to see something really happen.

 

[jackal]

I've uploaded the gig or so of data to Amazon S3 (much of the gig was uncompressed TIFF images of the proposed rail routes, so I recompressed those to the more manageable JPEG format). I'll need to sort through it all, renaming the files to more descriptive and less combobulated titles, and then I'll post some links here.

I don't think there is anything really newsworthy or earth-shattering in the files, but there are some nice maps and things.

 

[David K. Beals]

Alaska's state capital isn't even accessible by road, only water and air.

Not sure what you mean by this. Google shows some roads leading into Anchorage from Canada.

Anchorage isn't the capital.

The capital for Alaska is a ocean port city that exists without a highway access. The State of Alaska hasn't built a road to the City of Juneau.

 

[jackal]

Alaska's state capital isn't even accessible by road, only water and air.

Not sure what you mean by this. Google shows some roads leading into Anchorage from Canada.

Anchorage isn't the capital.

The capital for Alaska is a ocean port city that exists without a highway access. The State of Alaska hasn't built a road to the City of Juneau.

Dude, you do realize that this thread is over a year old, right?

On the other hand, thanks for bringing it up. For those who were interested in it, I never did get around to sorting all of the files I have on the Alaska-Canada Rail project.

I have them all uploaded, but unfortunately, Amazon S3 doesn't do virtual directory listings (since there's no such thing as a directory). I have to go through and paste the links to each individual file here (or create a web page that functions as a file listing). And while I'm at it, I might as well resize the 20MB TIFFs down to reasonably sized JPEGs, both to save you download time and to save me bandwidth costs (as insignificant as they are on Amazon S3).

Hopefully, I can get that done in less than another year...

 

[gswager]

Psst... keep bugging him to finish his project early :lol:

 

[jackal]

All right, all right!

Took me about an hour, but I threw together a VERY basic index.html file of the contents. I didn't do any transmogrifying or reticulating of splines or recompressing any files, so you're stuck with grabbing that 20MB TIFF image if you want to see it. (Y'all have 10mbps connections, right? )

The number to the left is the file size in bytes (1,000,000 is one megabyte).

Here's the index.html file (clicking this link may force you to download the file instead of viewing it in your browser, strangely; after you download the file, you can double-click it and it will re-open in your browser to allow you to access the actual linked files):

http://s3.amazonaws.com/trainmedia/misc/al...arail/index.htm

Let me know if any of the links don't work.

IP.Board doesn't appear to allow the use of HTML within posts, or I'd just post that list of files here in this post.

Edit: OK, here's the direct list of files so you don't need to download the index file above:

813,284 2005_Org-Des_Analysis.pdf

1,026,560 2005_Org-Des_Analysis.xls

189,440 2006_Vehicle_Assignments.xls

547,330 1_BNSF2006_West_Coast_Corridor_Coalition_Jan_17_Review.pdf

1,547,883 2_Port_of_Portland_Rail_overview.pdf

3,515,084 4_Ports_of_Long_Beach_and_LA.pdf

2,273,846 5_Port_of_tacoma_wccc_rail_jan_06_pot.pdf

3,060,757 ALASKA.TIF

15,872 ARRC_Cost_Proposal-UAF_Alaska_Canada_Rail_Link_Feasibility_Study.xls

62,464 ARRC_Cost_Proposal_to_UAF-Alcan_Rail_Link_Feasibility_Study.doc

32,256 Alaska_Canada_Rail_Connector_Mileage.xls

21,551 Alaska_Canada_Rail_Link-News_Release_031706.pdf

24,064 Alaska_Canada_Railroad_Connector_Feasibility_Study.doc

53,760 Amd.xls

187,452 AverageCycleTime.pdf

3,791 AverageLocoUnitMilesByClass.pdf

42,496 BenefitsAlaskaCanadaRailLink.doc

3,132,749 CanadaRails.pdf

579,360 CanadaRailsV1.pdf

7,913 CarMileageByCarKind.pdf

365,741 CarUtilizationReport.pdf

2,313,381 CarUtilizationReportGenericCars.pdf

27,136 Chinese_interest_in_Buying_WP&Y_RR-Whitehorse_Star_March_8_WP&YR.doc

51,200 Data_Needs_from_Alaska_RR.xls

46,592 Final_Work_Package_Budget_to_UAF.doc

6,168 FreightMilesSummary.pdf

23,064 GrossTrailingTons.PDF

27,571 GrossTrailingTons2.PDF

31,566 GrossTrailingTons3.PDF

4,090 LocUnitMiles.PDF

3,791 LocoMiles.pdf

3,791 LocoMilesAverage.pdf

13,706 LocoMilesByTrainClass.pdf

13,706 LocoUnitMiles1.PDF

13,706 LocoUnitMiles2.pdf

1,899,584 LocoUnitMiles3.pdf

4,090 LocoUnitMiles4.pdf

7,915 MileByCarKInd3.PDF

9,274 MileByCarKind.PDF

11,022 MileByCarKind1.PDF

9,276 MileByCarKind2.PDF

11,024 MilebyCarKind4.PDF

3,061 PassengerFleetSummary.pdf

32,256 Press_points_for_$50_mil.doc

1,424,637 Revised_Alaska_Canada_Route_Alternatives.pdf

566,784 Screen_Capture-Alcan_Routes.doc

25,483 TrainMIlesSummary.PDF

2,345 TrainMilesSummarySummary.PDF

22,519 TrainTrips.pdf

22,519 TrainTrips2.pdf

22,519 TrainTripsByClass.pdf

7,828,749 West_Coast_Corridor_Port_Information.pdf

9,098 ZeroMIlesSummary.PDF

1,657,018 alaska1.jpg

33,840 alcan.dwg

19,229,231 alcan.jpg

1,158,016 alcanraillinkpresentation.zip

7,743,151 canada.jpg

2,443,030 carreport.pdf

19,456 locomotivefuelefficiency.xls

551,936 passengerridershipdata.xls

501,535 railroutealternatives.jpg

55,347 revisedroute.jpg

465,659 russia-transsiberian_railroad.pdf

9,519,105 yukon.jpg

 

[AlanB]

IP.Board doesn't appear to allow the use of HTML within posts, or I'd just post that list of files here in this post.

Allowing HTML within posts can be very, very dangerous. Hackers can do very bad things to the board when that's allowed.

But I'm not not sure why you need HTML anyhow. All you made was a list of links, you could have just used the same link feature that you used to link to your index page.

 

[PetalumaLoco]

Index file downloaded quickly and opened ok (firefox)

Attempted to open each link, got the download or open with prompt, did not follow thru but am assuming the links work ok.

Except problems the the following links;

1_BNSF2006_West_Coast_Corridor_Coalition_Jan_17_Review.pdf

error mssg

"This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below."

alcan.dwg

This is an AutoCad drawing file and requires a viewer or Acad installation (on my laptop anyway)

 

[jackal]

IP.Board doesn't appear to allow the use of HTML within posts, or I'd just post that list of files here in this post.

Allowing HTML within posts can be very, very dangerous. Hackers can do very bad things to the board when that's allowed.

But I'm not not sure why you need HTML anyhow. All you made was a list of links, you could have just used the same link feature that you used to link to your index page.

Copy and paste, dude, copy and paste.

I'd have had to go through and reformat that long list to BB code instead of just copying and pasting it into the post. Actually, as I got to thinking about it after I posted, I think it would actually be easier than I thought, since I think this implementation of BB code is similar enough to HTML that I could probably just do a find and replace and replace all instances of <a href=" to , and then any leftover "> to ]. (I think I got that right.)

 

Maybe I'll do that...

 

Index file downloaded quickly and opened ok (firefox) 

Attempted to open each link, got the download or open with prompt, did not follow thru but am assuming the links work ok.

 

Except problems the the following links;

 

1_BNSF2006_West_Coast_Corridor_Coalition_Jan_17_Review.pdf

error mssg

"This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below."

 

alcan.dwg

This is an AutoCad drawing file and requires a viewer or Acad installation (on my laptop anyway)

 

I'll correct the filename on that first file (I left a space instead of converting it to an _ as I had in the index file). As far as the second one...well, I don't have Acad or any viewer, either, so I can't even tell you what's in it... If anyone does, feel free to tell us or to convert it into a file format viewable by normal people!

 

[PetalumaLoco]

I loaded it into my Acad viewer and it was blank. Which makes sense, the file size was only 36k or so, and an empty Acad file would be about that size.