In the summer of 1921, two halves of a steel arch reached toward each other across Hurricane Gulch, almost three hundred feet above the creek in the middle of Alaska, and neither half touched the far side. Two bare ribs of steel stuck out over nothing from opposite walls of the gorge, with men the size of ants walking out on them and Hurricane Creek a thin white thread at the bottom. Each half was kept from tipping into that gorge by steel bars anchored in the rock behind it, and stacked on top of those anchors, just for the weight, were 275 tons of railroad rails. The men out on that steel did not work for a railroad company.

They worked for the United States government. And the government was only there because every private company that had tried to build a railroad into Alaska had gone broke. If those two halves did not meet in the air, the track coming up from the coast stopped at the lip of a hole 284 miles north of Seward. Fairbanks, the gold town the whole line had been promised to, would stay out of reach.

And the money was already gone. Congress had set a limit of thirty-five million dollars for the entire railroad, and by that summer everyone in the commission knew the limit had broken back in the war years. How does a government lay about 470 miles of track across a territory with almost no roads? And why did Washington have to do the job itself?

The arch was nearly the last fight. Before anyone hung steel over that gulch, the job had to get through a creek full of tents that turned into a city, a strike, a fjord where the tide rises 38 feet, a world war that drained the camps, a slope of snow that came down on six men, and at the far end, a river so wide that for a while the railroad crossed it on track laid over the ice. The first of those problems was sitting in a coal bin on the dock at Seward. Seward sits at the head of Resurrection Bay on the Kenai Peninsula, an ice-free deepwater harbor.

In the years before 1914, a ton of coal on the Seward dock cost eighteen dollars. That number bothered people because Alaska was sitting on coal. The Matanuska field lay about 190 miles up the country from that same dock, in the valley north of Cook Inlet. Nobody could get it down to the water.

190 miles of spruce, muskeg, and mountains stood in the way, and there was no wagon road worth the name. The coal in Alaska’s own hills was worth nothing where it lay, and every ton burned on the coast came at the dock price. People had already tried to fix it with rails. Walking north out of Seward along the tracks means walking on a line that a private company started in 1903.

It was called the Alaska Central Railway, and its plan was to run all the way to the interior. The Alaska Central climbed into the Kenai Mountains the hard way. Up near the summit, it built a tight spiral of wooden trestles that railroaders called the loop, and one of those trestles stood 106 feet high on a 14-degree curve. That spiral would end up belonging to the government.

By 1909, the Alaska Central had built about 50 miles of track, and it was out of money. On the 11th of October that year, the line was foreclosed. A new company, the Alaska Northern, took over the rails and pushed another 21 miles to a place called Kern Creek near the head of Turnagain Arm. That was as far as it got.

About 71 miles of track ran from the dock into the mountains and stopped in the woods. The traffic on it shows how little was left. By late 1910, the only thing regularly running on the Alaska Northern was a gasoline speeder, a little motor car that rides the rails like a pump wagon with an engine. In 1912, the whole railroad carried 257 tons of freight for the entire year, along with about 2,600 passengers.

257 tons is a handful of boxcars. Over a whole year, it meant the line had nowhere useful to go. It started at a good harbor and ended at a creek. The investors had put in about four million dollars, and they could not get the track to the coal.

Far up in the interior, Fairbanks had its own little narrow gauge line, the Tanana Valley Railroad, running out to the gold camps. Between the two, there was nothing but country. Washington had been watching all of this. In 1912, Congress paid for a study, and a commission came back the next January recommending two railroads into the interior, about 733 miles of track.

On the 12th of March, 1914, Congress passed the Alaska Railroad Act. The government itself would build a line from the coast to the interior, no more than a thousand miles of it. The cost was fixed at thirty-five million dollars, and the president would choose the route. Three engineers were put on a new body called the Alaskan Engineering Commission under the Department of the Interior.

William Edes was the chairman. With him were Thomas Riggs, a surveyor, and an army engineer named Frederick Mears. They spent the summer of 1914 in the field with survey parties. On the 6th of June, one of the first of those parties set up at the mouth of a little creek on the Cook Inlet shore, a place called Ship Creek.

The commission sent its report to the president the next February without picking a route. There were two real choices. One started at Cordova or Valdez and ran up the Copper River country toward Fairbanks beside a railroad the Guggenheim mining interests already owned. Buying into anything tied to that name was politically unpopular in Washington.

The other started at Seward, bought up the bankrupt Alaska Northern, ran along Turnagain Arm and Knik Arm, turned up the Susitna Valley, crossed the Alaska Range at Broad Pass, and came down to Fairbanks. The second route went past the Matanuska coal and up through the Matanuska and Susitna valleys, country the planners hoped would grow farms and open mines. In April of 1915, President Woodrow Wilson chose it. The railroad would start at the harbor where coal was so expensive and run straight up the country toward the field that could bring the price down.

Private money had come at Alaska from that same dock twice and walked away both times. If that coal was ever coming out, it was coming out on a government railroad. Except the government did not have a railroad crew, a town, or even a camp in the middle of the route. All it had was a muddy creek on Cook Inlet.

And on the 26th of April 1915, the engineer in charge of the first rails arrived there and found that somebody had beaten him to it. The man who stepped onto the mud at Ship Creek was Mears, the army engineer on the commission, who had come to Alaska from the Panama Canal. In 1906, he had been a track foreman down in the Culebra Cut, and by 1914 he was running the whole Panama Railroad. George Goethals, the man who built the canal, recommended him for this job.

Mears knew how to lay track through mud and jungle. What he found at the mouth of Ship Creek was a town nobody had ordered. Word had gone out that the government railroad would be built from here, and people had come up Cook Inlet ahead of it. When Mears arrived, the flats along the creek were already covered in canvas.

There were restaurants in tents, clothing stores in tents, and a billiard hall in a tent. Within a few weeks, about 2,000 people were living there in tents and shacks, and drinking water was selling for 5 cents a bucket. That crowd had come for one thing, and Mears had it. He hired a first crew of 100 men at three dollars for an 8-hour day.

In 1915, there were more men on that creek than there were jobs, and the going wage was 37 and a half cents an hour. Three days after Mears arrived, on the 29th of April, the first new rails went down at Ship Creek. A lot of what came off the boats that summer had a history. The law that created the railroad told the commission to use surplus equipment from the Panama Canal, which had opened the year before.

Machinery that had dug the canal in the tropics was loaded onto ships and sent north, and it started landing at Ship Creek that summer. The same machines Mears had worked beside in the heat of Panama ended up beside him again on a cold creek in Alaska. But the tents were a problem no shovel could fix. 2,000 people on a mud flat with no streets and water by the bucket was the kind of camp that worried anyone who thought about it, and the railroad needed that flat ground along the creek for its own yards.

The man who got that job was Andrew Christensen, who ran the commission’s land office. On the 6th of May, 1915, he got permission to lay out a town. Christensen did not put it on the flats. He took his crews up onto the wooded bench south of the creek and cut survey lines through the trees.

What came out of that brush was a grid, 121 square blocks, each one 300 feet on a side, each block split into 12 lots 50 feet wide. Then the government held an auction. On the 10th of July, 1915, a crowd stood in the stumps on that bench while an auctioneer called out lots one at a time. Estimates of the crowd run anywhere from 1,000 to 3,000 people.

A photographer named Alberta Piatt took a picture on the last day of the sale, and the crowd facing the auctioneer is visible in it. The ledger from that sale still exists. A man named Nyberg paid $825 for a lot at 4th and C that had been assessed at 400. Leopold David, who would later be the town’s first mayor, paid $575 for his at 5th and C.

Out in the South Addition at the edge of the grid, you could buy a whole block for $25. By the end of the sale, about 655 lots had gone for roughly $150,000. Nobody got a deed that day. Buyers paid in installments and could not take title for 5 years, and plenty of those lots went back to the government before the railroad was done.

So the railroad had a town before it had a railroad. Anchorage began as the railroad’s construction camp at Ship Creek, and the federal government laid out and sold its first town lots in July of 1915. When the Chief of the United States Forest Service, Henry Graves, arrived there that September, he put the place into his diary in four words: “Mud was everywhere. ”

The mud dried, and the town kept growing faster than the track.

By the end of 1917, the camp had 1,349 buildings, telephones, a 65-bed hospital, and a three-story school with 17 teachers and 500 students. A railroad trade journal put the town at more than 5,000 people that year. A government that had come north to build a railroad was now running a city with a hospital to staff and a school to heat. And the railroad itself had barely started.

South of Ship Creek, the line still had to reach the old track coming up from Seward. When the commission’s engineers went down to look at what they had bought from the Alaska Northern, they found out what four million dollars of private money and five years of neglect had left behind. The government bought the Alaska Northern in 1915 for a fraction of what its investors had sunk into it. On paper, that was a bargain.

About 71 miles of track already ran north from the Seward dock, through the Kenai Mountains, and around the loop. Then the engineers started walking it. The old line climbed to a summit about 700 feet up near mile 12, then to a second one near 1,100 feet in the mountains around mile 45. The grades in that stretch ran as steep as 2.

2 percent. For a heavy coal train, that is a long pull, and everything the private company had built was made of wood that had sat out in coastal Alaska weather for years with almost nothing running on it. Trestles had to be rebuilt. Bridges had to be replaced.

Rail had to come up and go back down. By the time the commission was finished with that old railroad, it had spent about four and a half million dollars rebuilding it. Put those two numbers next to each other. The investors had spent about four million dollars building the line.

The government spent more than that just making it usable. That was the first time the bill came in bigger than anyone planned. It was not the last. So the work ran in two directions at once.

Down south, crews were tearing into the old Alaska Northern. Up at Ship Creek, the new line was pushing north toward the coal and south toward Turnagain Arm to meet the old track. And all of it ran on men with shovels and the machines from Panama. Those men were not happy.

The best account of how the crews felt in that first winter comes from one of them. Frank Hansen was a union man in Anchorage, and in November of 1916 he published a long piece in a socialist magazine called the International Socialist Review. He called it “Building a Union at 40 Below. ” Hansen was on one side of a fight, so his account has to be treated that way, but his numbers line up with the commission’s own wage rates.

He wrote that men were handling rails and ties in that winter weather for 37 and a half cents an hour, and the work was not steady. “Work one day and lay off four was a common thing here,” he wrote. On a mud flat in Alaska in January, a man had paid his own way north, water cost a nickel a bucket, and he got a day of work and then four days of nothing. On the 7th of February, 1916, the steel gang, the men who actually laid the rail, told the commission they wanted 50 cents an hour or there would be no steel laid.

The commission did not give it to them, so the men organized. They formed what Hansen calls the Alaska Labor Union, and they set a date. The general strike would start on the 22nd of April at noon. According to Hansen, 400 men joined the union that first night.

Within 5 days it was 1,200. By the 24th of April, the work on the government railroad had stopped. These men were striking against the United States government itself, on a job Congress had capped at a fixed price. On the 27th, the commission came back with an offer of a little over 40 cents.

The men held out. In the end, the two sides settled at 45 cents an hour for common labor, and on the 1st of May, 1916, the crews went back to work. A labor archive at Cornell University still holds the case file on the Alaska Railroad construction strike. It happened, and it went to arbitration.

The line had stood still for about 9 days in a country where the working season is short to begin with. What the crews did once they were back tells the rest. By the end of 1916, they had laid 60 miles of new track, graded 100 miles of roadbed, and cleared 230 miles of right-of-way through the forest. Cleared right-of-way is the part people forget.

Before a single rail goes down, a crew with axes and saws cuts a strip through the trees wide enough for the track and its ditches, and somebody has to drag every stump out of the way. 230 miles of that is a long cut through the spruce, running out ahead of the rails toward the interior. That December, on the 1st of the month, the commission opened its own hospital in Anchorage on 3rd Avenue. A government that had come to lay track now had wards and beds, and on a job like this one, it was going to need them.

But the hardest stretch of the whole south end was still untouched. The line from Seward had to get along the north shore of Turnagain Arm to meet the track coming down from Ship Creek, and nobody had even started the worst of it. Before the commission could throw everything at that shore, it needed a payoff. Washington had been told this railroad was about coal, and years into the job, the rails still had not reached the coal.

So in 1917, the commission pushed hard to the north. From Ship Creek, the line ran up along Knik Arm, turned up the Matanuska Valley, and climbed toward a coal camp called Chickaloon, 74 miles north of Anchorage. That was the biggest year the job ever had. At the peak, about 4,500 people were working for the commission.

Early the next year, the commission’s equipment list counted 21 locomotives and eight steam shovels, plus locomotive cranes, a pile driver, and a rotary snow plow. This railroad was not built by hand. There were plenty of men with picks and shovels, and plenty of photographs of them, but there were also steam shovels chewing into the cuts and cranes swinging rail off flat cars. The rotary plow was the standout machine on that list.

Imagine a household fan taller than a man, mounted on the front of a car and spun by a steam engine, so that instead of pushing snow, it chews into a drift and throws it off to the side of the track. In a country where one winter could bury the line, the railroad needed it. On the 24th of October 1917, the first train reached the coal at Chickaloon. Six days later, the first Matanuska coal came down the line to Anchorage.

That was the moment the whole argument in Washington had been about. Coal from Alaska’s own hills coming out on Alaska’s own railroad. Once those trains were running and the line was connected to the coast, the price at Seward came down from $18 a ton to about 9 or 10. Half.

All that money and all those years of failed private railroads, and one of the first things the government line did was cut the price of a ton of coal in half. But 1917 was also the year the United States went into the First World War, and that changed everything in the camps. Some of the men who laid track in Alaska were drafted, and the work slowed. The commission’s own information described what it felt like.

A railroad trade journal in October of 1918, working from the commission’s information, put it in plain words. The Turnagain Arm work had been delayed by the lack of a sufficient labor supply. And then one more sentence: labor requested additional increases, but these were refused. The workers who stayed were fewer, the prices of labor and materials were climbing, and when they asked for more money, the answer was no.

Then the war reached the top of the commission itself. In January of 1918, Mears left Alaska for France. The army put him in command of the 31st Railway Engineers. The man who had started the rails at Ship Creek was now serving with the army’s railway troops on a different continent.

That April, Riggs, another of the three original commissioners, a surveyor who had spent years marking the boundary between Alaska and Canada, was made governor of the territory. The railroad was losing its engineers just as it reached its hardest ground. The winter between those two years was a bad one. One trade journal called it the severe winter of 1917 and 1918, and said plainly that it delayed the work.

Up in the Talkeetna district, along the Susitna, there were still 30 inches of snow on the ground in late April. Down near Indian River, close to Turnagain Arm, there were 5 feet of it that same month. Five feet of snow in April means the working season has not started yet. And the camps still had to be fed and heated while the crews waited.

Then summer came, and with it the one thing in Alaska that is worse for a railroad than snow: the water that snow turns into. In late July of 1918, a glacial stream near mile 52 on the old Seward line came down in flood. From the 22nd of July to the 5th of August, the water washed out the line in the glacier section of the old Alaska Northern, the same stretch the government had just paid millions to rebuild. Up north the same summer, floods along the Nenana River washed out several miles of new grade, and the engineers had to give up on that alignment and move the line two to two and a half miles east.

The ground fought back in a different way every season. In winter, it was snow and cold. In spring, it was the meltwater. In summer, it was the floods.

The place where all of those enemies came together was the north shore of Turnagain Arm. By the end of the 1917 season, there was a 16-mile gap there that nobody had managed to close. Driving the Seward Highway south out of Anchorage, the road and the railroad squeeze together along the bottom of the Chugach Mountains with the cliffs going straight up on one side and Turnagain Arm on the other. That narrow shelf is where the government railroad had its worst miles.

The arm is a long narrow fjord that runs east from Cook Inlet, and the head of it sits at about mile 67 from Seward. The old Alaska Northern track had come down out of the mountains and stopped at Kern Creek near that head. The new track from Ship Creek had to come around the north shore to meet it. At the close of the 1917 season, 16 miles of that shore still had not even been graded.

The commission’s information printed in the trade press called it some of the most difficult construction work on the whole line. The first problem was the rock. Along that shore, the mountains come right down to the water, so there was nowhere to put a railroad except into the mountain itself. The crews had to cut a shelf.

The engineers estimated the excavation on that stretch at about 2 million 420,000 cubic yards, and about half of it was solid rock. A cubic yard is a little smaller than a kitchen refrigerator. Picture 2 and a half million of them, and half of those are solid rock that has to be drilled, blasted, and hauled away before a single tie goes down. The photographs from that fall of 1917 show how they did it.

There is one of a steam shovel at work at mile 83 in November. There is another from the 12th of November of what the caption calls a station gang at work on the Turnagain Arm division. Then there was the water. The commission’s figures said the water averaged about 38 feet from high tide to low.

That is taller than a three-story house, coming in and going out twice a day. At low tide, the trade journal said, you could walk about 9 miles across the arm. A few hours later, the same mud is under a fjord full of moving water. Every fill the crews built along that shore sloped down into that tide.

Rock and gravel dumped off the end of the grade ran down toward the flats, and the journal says the heavy fills were affected by the heavy tides. You build the bank on the falling water, and the rising water comes back and starts pulling at it. And then there was the mountain behind them. The slopes above Turnagain Arm drop snow in winter, a lot of it, and the slides come down right across the shelf the crews were cutting.

Here is the part that surprised people: in one stretch, the engineers decided the safest place for the railroad was not on the solid shelf against the mountain at all. It was out on the mud. They built a trestle about a mile long, and they carried the track on it about a quarter of a mile out from the foot of the hills over the tide flats. The reason the commission gave was to get the line away from the snow slides.

On one side, a mountain that throws avalanches. On the other, a mud flat that floods to 38 feet twice a day. And the engineers looked at both and put the railroad over the mud. The Anchorage Museum holds a photograph labeled the south end of the trestle across the Turnagain Arm tide flats around mile 83 or 84.

A railroad standing out in the middle of a mud flat on purpose. Through the summer of 1918, short of men, the crews worked in from both ends. And on the 10th of September 1918, at mile 78 and three-quarters, the rails from Anchorage and the rails from Seward finally met. Now a train could run from the ice-free dock at Seward all the way around Turnagain Arm to Ship Creek and up to the coal at Chickaloon.

The south end of the railroad was done. The coal could reach the sea. Anchorage was tied to its harbor. But the people in Fairbanks had been promised a railroad that came all the way to their town.

Between the Susitna Valley and the town on the Tanana River stood the Alaska Range, which the line would have to cross at a gap called Broad Pass. And somebody in the commission had just done the arithmetic on what it would cost to get there. The commission’s own data, written up in 1922 in a magazine called Railway Age, tells it in one long sentence. Increasing prices for labor and materials during 1918 and 1919 soon developed the fact that the road could not be completed for that sum.

That sum was the $35 million Congress had written into the law in 1914. The war had pushed up the price of materials and of every hour of a man’s work, and the commission still had the hardest part of the interior in front of it. The cap had broken and the railroad was not finished. A private company in that spot does what the Alaska Central did.

It runs out of money, the creditors take the track, and the rails stop in the woods. The government had one thing no private company in Alaska had ever had. It could go back and ask for more. It did.

In 1919, Congress authorized another $17 million, which brought the total to 52 million. That vote shows why Washington had to build this railroad itself. A private company would not have survived the day the money broke. The same year, the man who had started the rails came home.

In August of 1919, Mears was back in Alaska from France, and this time he was in charge of the whole thing. He replaced Edes, the chairman since the beginning, as chairman and chief engineer of the commission. He came back to a railroad split in two. The south end ran from Seward around Turnagain Arm, through Anchorage, and up into the Susitna Valley.

By the 4th of March, 1919, the end of steel had reached mile 227. The north end was based on the Tanana River. Back in 1917, the commission had bought the little narrow gauge Tanana Valley Railroad out of Fairbanks, mostly for its yard in town and on the river at a place called Nenana. It had built a camp of its own with a hospital, about 411 miles from Seward.

By November of 1919, by one account, the crews working out of the north had finished their stretch between Nenana and Fairbanks. Between the two ends was the middle of Alaska, and the middle of Alaska was the hardest country on the line. Coming north up the Susitna, the line had to cross the Susitna River itself at about mile 264. The engineers put that crossing on a single steel truss span of 504 feet bank to bank, with no piers standing in the river.

That decision tells you what they were afraid of. In spring, when the Susitna breaks up, the ice comes down the river in a rush, and anything standing in the current takes the hit. One long span meant there was nothing in the water for the ice to knock out. North of that, the line climbed to Broad Pass, the gap in the Alaska Range.

The National Park Service’s history of the region describes the work there as some of the most difficult construction on the line. And on the north side of the range, the track had to come down through the canyon of the Nenana River, where at a place called Moody, a whole mountain side was sliding. That slope needed constant work to hold it, and the grade there had to be rebuilt again and again. Even as the money came back, the miles got harder.

By the end of 1920, the commission had laid about 382 miles of new track. That is a lot of railroad, and Fairbanks was still out of reach. That spring of 1920, the line back on Turnagain Arm, the part that was supposed to be finished, reminded everyone what it was built on. The snow that comes off the Chugach slopes above the arm had been a worry since the first survey.

The commission estimated it would need about 8,000 feet of snow sheds in the Turnagain district, wooden roofs built over the track so slides could pour across them instead of burying the line. Most of the sheds ended up between about mile 43 and mile 80. A snow shed only protects the stretch it covers. Everywhere else, when a slide came down, men had to go out with shovels and dig the track free.

That is what was happening on the 28th of April, 1920, about 2 miles north of Girdwood, on the shore of Turnagain Arm. A slide had come down across the line, and a crew of railroad workers was out clearing the debris. While they were working, a second avalanche came down the same slope. It killed six of them.

They were not caught by surprise in the ordinary sense. They knew a slide had come down. They were there because of it, and the path that had already run once ran again, right over the men cleaning up after it. Documentaries about big builds like to throw out a death toll.

There is no total for this railroad that any source stands behind. Men were hurt and men died on this job, and the commission ran hospitals in Anchorage and Nenana for a reason. But the six at Girdwood in April of 1920 are the deaths the record actually counts. Two weeks later, on the 11th of May, someone photographed the snowslides at miles 76 and 77 and the south end of the shed at mile 76.

Those pictures were made at a different spot, not where the six men died, but they show what the crews were digging through that spring. The work went on because it had to. The government could keep paying when the money broke. It could not do anything about the snow except dig, build roofs, and send men back out.

By the spring of 1921, the track coming up from the Susitna had reached a place where the ground simply dropped away. Hurricane Gulch is a narrow gorge with Hurricane Creek at the bottom, close to 300 feet down, and the railroad had to get across it in the air with nothing in between to stand on. Hurricane Gulch sits up in the country between the Susitna Valley and Broad Pass. Both walls fall away steeply to the creek.

The trade journals of the day called the drop about 300 feet. Later measurements put the bridge 296 feet above the creek. Either way, nothing a railroad could stand on reached the bottom. The commission’s answer was a steel arch, the kind that springs from one wall of a gorge, curves up, and comes down on the other wall with the track carried flat across the top of it.

The arch itself would span 384 feet, and the whole bridge with its approaches would run more than 900 feet from rim to rim. Nearly a thousand tons of steel would go into the arch alone, and another 530 tons into the approaches. The American Bridge Company fabricated and put up the steel, and the bridge would cost about 1. 2 million dollars.

But before anyone could think about the arch, there was a much plainer problem. The trade journal Railway Review put it bluntly in 1922. The real trouble would come when it was necessary to transport the construction materials. The railroad was coming up from the south, and the steel came up the line on flat cars to the south rim of Hurricane Gulch.

Half of that bridge had to be built on the north rim, and the only way from one rim to the other was 300 feet down and 300 feet back up. In March of 1921, a photograph shows a cable tramway strung across the gulch, a line for carrying loads from one side to the other through the air. For the heavy steel, the engineers worked out something cruder and stronger. They put a locomotive crane out on the end of the south half of the arch as it grew and used it to lower steel members down to the floor of the gulch.

On the north side, they set up a tall A-frame derrick, and it hauled those same pieces back up the other wall. Every piece of the north half of that arch went down into the gorge from the south and came back up on the north. One lift at a time. Then came the part that made this bridge famous among engineers.

An arch only holds itself up once it is finished. The two halves lean on each other in the middle, and that is where all the strength comes from. Until the two halves meet, each one is just a long steel arm sticking out over nothing, and its own weight wants to pull it down into the gorge. The usual way around that is to build a forest of timber scaffolding up from the bottom to hold the arch until it is done.

At Hurricane Gulch, the engineers did not do that. Each half of the arch was built straight out from its own wall with nothing underneath it. Think of a diving board. The end of the board hangs out over the water, and the only reason it does not drop in is that the back end is bolted down hard.

Stand on the back of the board, and you can hang even more weight off the front. At Hurricane Gulch, the back of the board was a set of heavy steel bars called backstays. They ran from each half of the arch back to anchorages set into the ground behind the rims, tied in through the approach spans. As each half of the arch reached farther out over the gorge, those backstays pulled back against it and kept it from tipping in.

And to make sure the anchors held, the builders stood on the back of the board. A commission photograph dated the 8th of August, 1921, credited to a photographer named H. G. Kaiser, carries this caption: “275 tons of steel rails placed on the backstays serve as a counterweight.

” The railroad was using its own rails, the same rails it had come to lay, as a weight to keep its bridge from falling into a hole. Through June and July, the two halves grew toward each other. The south half was fed by the train coming up behind it. The north half was fed piece by piece out of the gorge by the derrick.

Day by day, the gap in the middle got smaller. At its widest, the gap between the two erecting units was 192 feet, with nothing between them but air and the creek far below. Two arms of steel, each one held up only by the bars and the rails behind it, reaching for each other from opposite sides of a gorge. And here is what kept the engineers awake.

The two halves had been built separately from opposite sides by crews who could only see each other across the gulch. When they finally met in the middle, the steel had to line up pin to pin or the arch could not be closed. Steel moves. It sags under its own weight as it reaches out, and it grows and shrinks with the temperature through the day.

Two arms built from opposite sides of a gorge in the Alaska summer were never going to arrive in exactly the right place by luck. The answer was in the backstays. Every pair of those backstay bars had a sliding joint built into it, a telescope joint, where the bar could get a little longer or a little shorter. And in each of those joints, the builders had put a hydraulic jack rated at 500 tons.

Remember the diving board. If you slowly let the back end of the board rise, the front end tips down. By working the jacks and pulling out the steel shims packed into those joints, the crews could let each backstay out by a tiny amount, and each half of the arch would lean forward and settle a little lower toward the middle. They did not have to hope the two halves met in the right place.

They could steer them there. A little at a time, the crews on each rim let their half down. The two arms of steel crept toward each other in the air, and the crews in the middle watched the bottom cords, the heavy lower members of the arch, come together where a single steel pin was waiting to join them. Railway Review recorded the result in a phrase worth putting on a plaque.

They went together to an accurate fit. The two halves came down onto the pins at the center, and the arch stood on its own. For the first time since the work began, Hurricane Gulch had something in the middle of it besides air. On the 13th of August, a photograph caught the tower at the north end of the bridge, two days before the first train.

The rest went fast. The deck went on, the track went down, and on the 15th of August 1921, the first train rolled across Hurricane Gulch. There is a photograph of it labeled with the date, a train crossing the new bridge. The day after, someone gathered the bridge crew together for a picture.

It is in the Anchorage Museum’s collection now, a glass negative labeled “Hurricane Gulch Bridge Crew,” the 16th of August, 1921. Those are the men who walked out on the two halves when there was nothing under them. And it is still there. The Alaska Railroad still runs trains across that arch more than a century later.

But on the day that first train crossed, the railroad still did not reach Fairbanks. North of the Gulch, the line ran on over Broad Pass and down the Nenana River Canyon, and then it came to the Tanana River at Nenana, where every crossing so far had been temporary. The Tanana is a big glacial river, and at Nenana it runs between the camp the commission had built and the last stretch of line to Fairbanks. By then, Nenana itself had grown into a commission town, about a thousand people as early as 1917, with the commission’s hospital among its buildings.

The engineers had already tried living with the river. In 1918, they had put a temporary bridge across at Nenana, the kind of crossing that everybody knew would go out with the spring breakup, when the ice on the river cracks apart and comes downstream. So for a while, the railroad crossed the Tanana without a real bridge. In summer, freight and passengers got off at Nenana and went over on a ferry.

In winter, the commission did something that is hard to believe. It laid narrow gauge track right across the frozen river and ran cars over the ice. A railroad run by the United States government, with its cars rolling over a river on rails laid on the ice. That is how things stood on the 5th of February, 1922, when the commission opened through service between Seward and Fairbanks.

You could finally ride from the dock to the gold town, as long as you did not mind getting off at the river. Five days later, on the 10th of February, a photographer was down the line at Riley Creek, near the entrance to what was then Mount McKinley National Park, taking pictures of the new bridge there. The line through the mountains was open. Nobody was going to call that finished.

A railroad that has to change to a ferry in the middle is not a through line, and Washington wanted a bridge. The design came from Modjeski and Angier, a bridge engineering firm in Chicago, and the steel came again from the American Bridge Company. The main span would be 700 feet of steel truss, one long box of triangles reaching from one pier to the next without touching the water in between. By one period count, only one steel truss span in the United States was longer.

The commission’s estimate for the job, with all its approaches and trestles, was $1,800,000. And this bridge had its own clock. The plan gave the steel crews a window from the 1st of November, 1922, to the 1st of March, 1923. The heaviest work on the biggest span of the railroad was scheduled for the dead of an interior Alaska winter.

On the 11th of May, 1922, crews started digging the pits for the piers. All summer they worked down into the riverbed and built up the concrete. A photograph from the 8th of September shows them pouring the last concrete on pier 12. Then came the falsework.

A truss that long cannot hold itself up until it is complete. So the builders put up a temporary timber frame under it to carry the steel while it was assembled. There is a photo from the 2nd of November looking north over that falsework, the very start of the winter window. Through November, December, January, and into February, steel went up over the Tanana on that timber frame, through the shortest days of the year, in the cold of the interior.

On the 9th of February, 1923, a photographer took a picture labeled simply “Tanana River Bridge. ” By early 1923, the bridge was done with the main span, a steel viaduct 420 feet long, and more than 200 short timber trestle spans carrying the approaches across the low ground. The last 57 miles of the line into Fairbanks, the old narrow gauge, were widened to standard gauge the same year. For the first time, a standard gauge train could run all the way from tidewater at Seward to Fairbanks.

That summer, the president of the United States came to see it. Warren Harding was the first sitting president ever to visit Alaska. He came north in July of 1923, and he rode the government railroad. There is a photograph from that trip that stands out more than the official ones.

It shows Harding at Willow on the line north of Anchorage painting the siding of a new railroad section house. The president of the United States with a paintbrush. The president’s train moved fast. The superintendent of Mount McKinley National Park, Harry Karstens, wrote in his monthly report that the presidential party arrived at his station at 10:30 in the morning and departed at 10:50.

Twenty minutes, and the train was rolling again. Up in Fairbanks, he wrote, “The whole populace turned out in holiday attire. ” One photograph from the trip shows Harding looking over a model of the new Tanana Bridge. Another, from the ceremony itself, has three figures marked on it by hand.

The president, Mrs. Harding, and his secretary of commerce, Herbert Hoover. On the 15th of July, 1923, at the north end of the new bridge at Nenana, Harding was to drive the last spike. The spike was solid gold, 14 karat, about 5 and a half inches long.

It was a gift from the city of Anchorage, the town that had started as a tent camp on Ship Creek, to Mears, the engineer who had walked into that camp in 1915. According to the New York Times account of the ceremony, the gold spike was tapped twice with a silver sledgehammer. Then it was replaced with an ordinary spike for the president to drive. The Anchorage Museum, which owns the gold spike today, says this was the only time a sitting president drove a railroad spike.

And the president missed twice. The Times account says he failed to hit the ordinary spike on his first two attempts. Driving a spike is a skill, and the men who had laid 467 miles of track could have told him that. Eight years of work, a broken budget, a strike, a war, six men under the snow, and an arch hung over a gorge.

And at the end of it all, the president could not hit the last spike on his first two tries. There is no record of anything Harding said there, so there is no way to put words in his mouth. What happened next is not a railroad story, but it is part of this one. Harding left Alaska and went south.

Eighteen days after the ceremony at Nenana, on the 2nd of August, 1923, he died at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. There was no autopsy, and nobody has ever settled exactly what killed him. The gold spike went to Mears, and then into private hands for about 100 years. In January of 2025, it came up for auction at Christie’s in New York, and the Anchorage Museum and the city of Nenana bought it together with money from private donors, the Alaska Railroad among them.

The final price, with the auction house premium, was $201,600. The spike went home to Alaska, and the railroad it finished was, by then, older than the state of Alaska itself. So what did it cost? By 1922, counting the branches to the coal fields and the old Fairbanks line, the government owned about 539 miles of railroad in Alaska.

The commission’s own projection, printed that year, put the whole job at about $56 million. That is roughly 60 percent over the cap Congress wrote into the law in 1914. Worked out by the mile, the track alone came to about $78,000 a mile before counting a single locomotive or car. Add the equipment and all the facilities it took to make it run, and the same journal put it at about $120,000 a mile.

And the money did not stop when the spike went in. In June of 1923, a month before the ceremony, an executive order had put the operation of the railroad under the Department of the Interior. For years it lost money, with Congress covering the gap. The reason is in the population figures.

The railroad’s own history says that in 1930, Seward, Anchorage, and Fairbanks together held about 5,400 people. The construction crowd was gone. A railroad nearly 500 miles long was running between three small towns. In 1930, a federal report called for cutting back hard.

Passenger fares went up by nearly two-thirds. Train miles were cut from about 262,000 a year to about 91,000 by 1933. The payroll went from 934 people to 650. The man who ran the railroad through those years was a general manager named Otto Ohlson, who had taken over in August of 1928.

Under him, the cuts held. And in 1938, 15 years after the gold spike, the Alaska Railroad turned its first profit. Not everyone who built it thought it was worth it. Andrew Christensen, the man who laid out the Anchorage grid in the stumps, wrote a letter to Time magazine in 1935 from his home in New York.

He called the territory “the spoiled child of Uncle Sam. ” He said it was a place of impossible conditions, where there were no resources to justify a permanent population. That is a bitter thing to read from the man who sold the first lots. In 1935, with the railroad bleeding money and the towns half empty, he had a case.

He was wrong about the people, though. The city he laid out on that bench above Ship Creek is now the biggest in Alaska, still built on his grid of numbered and lettered streets. The Second World War brought the railroad big profits. In 1943, tunnels were finished to a new port at Whittier, a cutoff that shortened the run from tidewater by 51 and a half miles.

The 1964 earthquake did about $30 million of damage to it. In 1967, it moved from the Interior Department to the new Department of Transportation. Congress passed a law in January of 1983 to hand the railroad over. And in January of 1985, the state of Alaska bought it from the federal government for about 22.

3 million dollars. The state then put more than 70 million dollars into it. Washington had spent about 56 million building it in the 1910s and 20s. About 60 years later, it sold the whole railroad to the state for less than half of that.

As for Mears, after Alaska he went to work for the Great Northern Railway on the Cascade Tunnel, nearly 8 miles under the mountains of Washington state. He died in January of 1939. In 1974, the bridge at Nenana was dedicated in his name. It is called today the Mears Memorial Bridge.

You can still ride almost all of it. Counting branches and yards, the railroad runs about 656 miles of track today. Freight cars still go to Seattle on rail barges out of Whittier. In 2025, the railroad carried about 227,600 passengers, a lot of them on the same line Harding rode.

At its busiest, in 1996, it carried about 512,000. Start on the dock at Seward, at the head of Resurrection Bay, where the coal used to cost $18 a ton. The track runs north out of town on the old Alaska Central grade, up into the Kenai Mountains. You will not ride the loop.

In 1951, the railroad spent a million dollars on a new line around it, a steeper grade built for diesels. The spiral the government inherited from a bankrupt company is gone from the main line. Come down out of the mountains, and the track turns along Turnagain Arm, right beside the Seward Highway. This is the shelf they cut out of the rock in 1917 and 18.

If you time it for low tide, you will see the mud flats run out toward the far shore, and you will understand why anyone would put a railroad out there. Near Girdwood, the track passes under the slopes where six men died in April of 1920. At Anchorage, the railroad’s yards still sit on the flats along Ship Creek, the same ground where Mears found 2,000 people in tents. Walk up the hill, and you are on Christensen’s grid.

Fourth and C is still Fourth and C. North of town, the line runs up Knik Arm and into the Susitna Valley, past Willow, where a president once painted a section house. At about mile 264, it crosses the Susitna on that single long span, built so the spring ice had nothing to hit. Then, at mile 284, the train goes out over Hurricane Gulch, more than 900 feet of bridge on the arch from the summer of 1921.

In August of 2026, the railroad got a federal grant of $28. 8 million to rehabilitate it, more than 20 times what the whole bridge cost to build, so the trains can keep crossing that gorge. Over Broad Pass, down past Denali National Park, through the Nenana River Canyon, and past Moody, then Nenana, and the long steel truss over the Tanana, where the last spike went in. And then Fairbanks, the gold town the whole thing was promised to, about 470 miles from the dock at Seward.

Go back then to the picture this story started with. Two halves of a steel arch reaching across Hurricane Gulch, almost 300 feet in the air, neither one touching the other side. Each one held back by steel bars and a stack of railroad rails, 275 tons of them, keeping it from falling into the gorge. Those two halves did not meet because anybody got lucky.

They met because the men on the rims could let the backstays out a little at a time, jack by jack, until the steel came together to an accurate fit. The whole railroad got built that way. Every time the money ran out, every time the war took the men, or the snow took the line, somebody behind it let out a little more, and the two ends kept reaching for each other until they met. Nineteen years after Harding’s spike, the army needed a way into Alaska by road, and had one summer to cut it.

That would be the next chapter in this story.