So with help from Elliott, General Hoge pried his equipment out of Seattle and got it headed up the Inside Passage. But his problems moved with the equipment.
Arriving in Skagway, it quickly overwhelmed the tiny harbor. Besides being small, Skagway Harbor offered twenty-foot tides which made the process of unloading vessels complicated. Incoming vessels waited for high tide, then, as the water level fell, port battalion troops hurried their crawler cranes in to unload them before the tide came back up. Behind the crawler cranes, trucks sped back and forth, moving cargo to higher ground.
In the end the engineers dug a long, deep slip, piling the dirt and rocks they removed into a ‘fill’ alongside. Vessels could remain afloat in the slip and cranes could work from the fill whatever the status of the tide.
Material safely above the water line in Skagway, of course, still had a long way to go to reach the highway and its builders. The WP&YR provided the next link in the transportation chain. In April trains crossed the pass ten to fifteen times a day—a huge increase from anything the tiny railroad had ever experienced before. In May that number increased to thirty-four trains.
Eight to ten heavily loaded railroad cars, pulled by three to five locomotives and pushed by one, would roar laboriously up and up and around and around through the White Pass. And what goes up must, of course, come down. Emptied of cargo in Carcross or Whitehorse, each train had to return to Skagway over the same difficult route. Soldiers called the WP&YR “The Wait Patiently and You Can Ride.”
The unceasing traffic wore on the old narrow-gauge track. The Army could bring in locomotives and rolling stock, but they couldn’t do much about track and roadbed; hauled much heavier loads than those could stand.
With time, the Army adapted; ran smaller trains. One engine and a pusher would pull small trains up the mountain to Lake Bennett where crews assembled them into a longer train for the run along the lake and on to Whitehorse.