The steepest railroad grade in the world, the White Pass and Yukon Railway (WP&YR), carried men, supplies, and equipment for building the Alaska Highway up into Yukon Territory in 1942. From sea level at the Skagway dock the rails climbed 2,900 feet in just 19 miles.
The Saturday Evening Post in its November 27, 1943 issue featured an article called “Highballing It At 60 Below”. Captain Richard L. Neuberger wrote that the “old-timers and sourdoughs” had tried to warn the soldiers…”
Highly experienced, the soldiers of the 770th Railway Battalion thought they had seen everything. But “…with the thermometer on the station platform at Whitehorse registering sixty-eight degrees below zero and the snow piled forty feet deep on the uplands at Fraser Loop,” they learned different.
On the steepest grade, straight up out of Skagway, “The lead engine of a train is frequently thirty feet higher on the mountain wall than the caboose. Curves are so sharp that trains rounding them are curled up like a cowpuncher’s lariat. Overhanging precipices frown down on the thirty-six-inch tracks, and below the ties the cliff falls away 1200 sheer feet to the turbulent waters of the Skagway River.”
Stop a steam locomotive to take on water and its wheels freeze to the rails. When that happened, they called another locomotive up to “give the train a shattering bump.” In the Skagway yards, crews moved locomotives every ten minutes. “Drifting, wind-blown snow plugged the line at innumerable points.”
During the worst storm of the winter, “The mercury plummeted out of sight… Couplings that were wet had to be separated with acetylene torches. Metal became brittle and drawbars snapped under the loads. Fire doors in snorting, straining locomotives were coated with half an inch of frost. Exhaust steam pouring back into engine cabs froze the overalls of the G.I. crews as stiff as planks.”
Past the top of the grade the locomotives quit one after another. “When 81 and 62 at last succumbed to the blizzard, Colonel Wilson and twenty-two of his GI railroaders found themselves marooned. They took refuge in a tiny cabin near the line…”
From Carcross a D-4 cat bucked high winds across the frozen surface of Lake Bennett, ascended the pass and got through to the cabin with a load of food. ‘That bulldozer,’ said Wilson, ‘looked to us like six regiments with colors flying.’
What a magnificent look back in history. Those were amazing, brave & strong men.
Thank you for that. They were indeed amazing men.