General Hoge directed the 1500-mile project from a ramshackle office with a homemade desk and empty packing crates as file cabinets at Headquarters in Whitehorse. The Hoge Highway “the Burma Road of North America” would be a more finished bit of construction if it did not have to be done in a terrific hurry. But it did have to be done in a terrific hurry.
With two regiments jammed into Skagway and a highway to build, Hoge made plans and ordered their execution with frantic haste. The 93rd and the 340th needed to be out on the road—bulldozers be damned.
The snarl of men and equipment at the WP&YT rail head in Skagway mushroomed into a major problem. The railroad’s capacity had grown steadily since its completion in 1900. By the time of WWI, the railroad carried 10,000 to 15,000 passengers and thirty tons of freight per year which meant travelling over the pass once or maybe twice a week. By the 20’s and 30’s the train traveled daily over the pass.
Now, in April of 1942, the train was crossing the pass, ten to fifteen times a day, if not more, and doing it with an inadequate supply of locomotives and forty-year-old train cars. Frank E. Andrews, PRA construction engineer in Whitehorse, warned Hoge that a major transportation bottleneck threatened.
Some of the heavy equipment for the 18th had arrived and made its way through the bottleneck. The remainder might arrive sometime in May. Heavy equipment for the 93rd and the 340th had not arrived and no one knew when it would—good for the bottleneck but bad for the road.