Like dirt in front of a dozer blade, the problems that plagued the Alaska Highway Project piled high in May and the hell-bent advance into the wilderness threatened to dissolve in chaos and confusion. Three entry points, Skagway, Valdez and Dawson Creek, swarmed with confused troops trying desperately to get organized.
Getting equipment to the North Country posed the first problem—especially in the Northern Sector.
In 1942 a road building engineering regiment came equipped with an enormous quantity of heavy equipment and other vehicles to support it.
The few troops the regiments managed to put to work attacked the road with axes, shovels, picks and wheelbarrows. Their heavy equipment jammed the docks in Seattle and the jam got worse by the day—like dirt in front of a dozer blade.
In Seattle General Hoge found E.W. Elliott, a private contractor who had managed to assemble a flotilla of freighters, tugs, barges, scows and several pleasure yachts. By hook or by crook, Elliott began to move Hoge’s equipment.
The second problem, getting the equipment and the men who would use it off Elliott’s vessels and through a seemingly endless wilderness to the work site—emerged as in its most virulent form in Yukon Territory.
Link to Another Story “Segregation came to Skagway in 1942.”
Equipment and supplies arriving in Skagway quickly overwhelmed the tiny harbor. Worse, the harbor’s twenty-foot tides made the process of unloading the vessels complicated. Barges had to time their arrival for high tide. 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 the cargo to higher ground.
Worse, material safely above the water line in Skagway still had a long way to go to reach the highway and its builders. In April WP&YR 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 daily trains.
More on the Corps of Engineers in WWII
And as the number of trains increased, the old narrow gauge track became increasingly difficult to maintain. The Army brought in locomotives and rolling stock, but they couldn’t do anything about the track and they hauled much heavier loads than the equipment and roadbed could stand.
Eight to ten heavily loaded railroad cars, pulled by three to five locomotives and pushed by one, would roar laboriously up the 3,000-foot climb to White Pass and on to Carcross and Whitehorse. Soldiers called the WP&YR “The Wait Patiently and You Can Ride.”