The White Pass and Yukon Route Railroad, Scenic Views Like No Where Else

The narrow-gauge White Pass and Yukon Route Railroad, located in Alaska, is the busiest tourist railroad in the country, even more popular than the legendary Strasburg Railroad, due to the line’s spectacular scenery and limitless supply of tourists aboard cruise ships that dock at Skagway. While the WP&YR today is a very successful tourist railroad its heritage lies as a freight hauler, once serving several ore mines located between Skagway, Alaska and the Yukon Territory of Canada (which is another unique feature of the railroad, its lines are split with half operated in the United States and the other half in Canada). While the Alaska Railroad offers some spectacular scenery of its own few train rides anywhere in the world offer such stunning scenery as the WP&YR.

Alaska railroading is as remote as it is beautiful. Here, you may not find any of the classic fallen flags or current Class Is, Regionals, or even shortlines. However, railroading does exist here (even though it got a much later start than in the lower forty-eight states) and with the state’s longest railroad, the Alaska Railroad (ARR), offering passenger service across much of its system, you have the chance to see some of the most spectacular scenery in the world. One day, the hope is to eventually connect the ARR with the rest of the North American rail grid but for now it goes about its business, as it has since 1985 (when it came under state ownership), moving both people and goods.

Because of Alaska's beauty its railroads today haul nearly as many passengers as it does freight. Currently the state holds 506 route miles of trackage with the ARR pulling double duty using most of that (nearly 400 miles) to haul passengers and freight (the ARR is also the only privately owned railroad which still has daily operating passenger trains).

The White Pass and Yukon Route Railroad is currently one of two operating railroads in Alaska (the other being the famous Alaska Railroad), although it is purely for tourism after freight service ended in 1982 after the final mine it served closed that year, which then forced the railroad to cease operations. It reopened in 1988 as a 40-mile tourist line and has grown by leaps and bounds since then. Today it is the nation’s busiest tourist railroad, thanks in part to the thousands of yearly passengers it receives from cruise ships that literally dock right next to the rails.

Aside from the tremendous scenery afforded during trips, another draw of the WP&YR is that it uses eleven unique shovelnose diesels, built by General Electric between 1954 and 1966 and the railroad also operates two Baldwin steamers, a Mikado 2-8-2, and a 2-8-0 type. The railroad has grown so much over the last twenty years that in 2007 it reopened 27 more miles of the original line, north to Carcross in the Yukon. For more information about riding the White Pass and Yukon Route Railroad or to just learn more about the railroad please click here to visit their website.