Riding the Rails Where the Grizzlies Roam: A Rail Journey Through Alaska

 

I have not blogged much about foreign railway travel, largely because I do not travel much on trains when abroad. Of course, even less when in India, because I am a railwayman for life but not really a railfan.

After retirement, the last substantial railway journey I undertook was in Uzbekistan. I was fascinated by how Talgo train technology enabled the country to operate Afrosiyob services at speeds up to 250 kmph on infrastructure not transformed into a conventional high-speed railway. There was no fencing, perhaps because it is a sparsely-populated country; nevertheless, during a slower journey, we had a cattle-run-over incident. The way it was handled by staff and locals added an unexpected dimension to my railway education, reminiscent of travellers forming a line to fetch water for a Sri Lankan locomotive which had suffered a Hot Engine shutdown. That story some other day.

That Uzbekistan experience earned me entertaining reactions from semi-literate trolls who commented that because Uzbekistan has a smaller population than India, there could be no comparison between their railways. Apparently, population size is now a recognised engineering parameter. Others advised that I hurry back to Uzbekistan and never return.

Talgo is topical! India once went through an embarrassing flirtation with Talgo trains, an episode I have written about earlier. The discussions and trials came, hype built and then, as frequently happens on Indian Railways (IR), the idea quietly went away.

The blogs covering those experiences are referenced at the end.

During our Alaska visit, we made a deviation, recommended by friends, to experience the journey from Anchorage to Fairbanks by the Alaska Railroad, travelling through Talkeetna and Denali. We did it in two stages: Anchorage to Talkeetna in roughly four hours, and Talkeetna to Fairbanks in an eight-hour journey. Anupama will write separately about our Alaskan experience, so I will focus on the train in this blog.

And what a journey it was.

A railway born of necessity

The Alaska Railroad isn't just a tourist train that happens to have eye candy outside its windows. It is a serious, hard-working railway with a wild history. Things kicked off in the early twentieth century when private companies began creeping northward from Seward. Unsurprisingly, these ventures bled cash, prompting the US Congress in 1914 to step in and order the federal government to build a Seward-Fairbanks railway, assigning the job to the Alaska Engineering Commission.

Anchorage owes its origin to the tracks. In 1915, it was a tent city on Ship Creek until the railway set up headquarters there, which drew nearly 5,000 workers. Building a railway through the wilderness back then was brutal. There were no helicopters, satellite mapping, or modern earth-moving monsters, and absolutely no corporate PowerPoint presentations falsely reassuring stakeholders that everything was “on track”. Somehow they pulled it off by 1923, and President Warren G. Harding even made the trek north to ceremonially hammer in the golden spike at Nenana, reportedly without missing the nail.

An apocryphal construction story says that during the brutal winter of 1916, the engineering crew lost their only blueprint for a tricky Susitna River bridge. Rather than halting work, the chief engineer supposedly sketched the missing design on the back of a frozen moose-meat wrapper using charcoal from the campfire. The crew built it anyway, and to everyone’s utter amazement, the tracks aligned. I am just not entirely sure if the wrapper has been filed away under ‘Official Project Documentation’.

Geographically, the railroad is mostly one long trunk line linking the coastal port of Seward to interior Fairbanks, cutting through Anchorage, Talkeetna, and Denali. It also has critical branches to flex its network capabilities. There is the Whittier Branch, a 19-km spur at Portage that tunnels straight through the Chugach Mountains; the military blasted two massive tunnels to link up with Whittier, turning it into a crucial wartime deepwater port and fuel depot. It even hooks Alaska to the U.S. mainland rail network by rolling trains onto massive ocean barges. Then there is the Eielson Branch, a 45 km freight-only extension branching from Fairbanks to keep the local Air Force base supplied. The railway became a lifeline for military logistics during WWII, playing a high-stakes game of connect-the-dots between Anchorage, the interior, and the coast.

Uncle Sam kept ownership until 1985, when the State of Alaska bought it out. Today, the Alaska Railroad Corp. is state-owned but runs surprisingly like a real, profit-driven business, tasked with making enough money to pay its own bills and fix its own tracks. It is a functional railway deeply baked into Alaska's identity. There are definitely a few lessons in self-sufficiency for IR to take note of there!

As for passenger service, it mostly caters to tourists looking for great views. There is the Denali Star, the flagship route from Anchorage to Fairbanks that we took. They also run the Coastal Classic, a stunning day trip along Turnagain Arm to Seward, the Glacier Discovery, which drops hikers near Whittier and Grandview, and the Aurora Winter Train, for brave souls chasing northern lights to Fairbanks in the dead of winter.

And then there was our train

Our first leg train looked reassuringly like a train: twin diesels, followed by eight coaches, Including a couple of double-deckers. There was nothing remotely resembling a Vande Bharat about it, and that was precisely the point.

The Denali Star covers the 570 km Anchorage-to-Fairbanks journey in about 12 hours, running through Southcentral and Interior Alaska, with stops at Wasilla, Talkeetna and Denali National Park.

Our first reaction as railwaymen was that surely they could make this faster. But as the train started and we looked out of the window, that thought disappeared. The railway passed through an extraordinary landscape of forests, mountains, rivers and lakes. At times water appeared on both sides of the train, while elsewhere the track disappeared into endless woodland. Tunnels were rare, but numerous picturesque bridges carried the railway across rivers and streams.

One spectacular structure is the Hurricane Gulch bridge, rising 92 m above the valley. Looking down from that height reminds an engineer that bridges are not merely lines on drawings. But please do not start comparing it with the much higher Chenab bridge; beauty, not comparison, is the point here.

I learnt that current infrastructure documentation records passenger speeds up to 100 kmph, with higher limits possible on selected sections. But our experience was sedate. The combination of curves, gradients, track conditions and difficult terrain meant the train did not behave as though wanting to prove a point to the Vande Bharat Indian. And frankly, who cared?

There are two passenger experiences on the Denali Star. Adventure Class, in which we were booked, is the conventional offering with comfortable seating, large windows and access to the upper deck of the common Vista Dome car. GoldStar is the premium version with glass-domed ceilings, an upper-level outdoor viewing platform and a lower-level dining facility; the outdoor viewing deck is ingenious. You can stand outside and breathe clean Alaskan air or watch the landscape leaning out of a window which I suspect would receive universal approval from Indians used to IR trains.

The upper deck also produces a curious phenomenon: passengers suddenly becoming amateur wildlife photographers. A moose appears in the distance and within seconds half the coach is pointing cameras at what looks like a large shrub.

The desperation to spot wildlife brings out an aggressive survival instinct in otherwise polite tourists. A rumour rippled through our car that a grizzly bear was visible on the right, triggering an instant stampede toward the windows. As an Indian railwayman, I am familiar with the chaotic art of boarding unreserved coaches, but even I was unprepared for the velocity of retirees charging with cameras. I managed a tiny viewing spot next to a gentleman aggressively narrating the bear's movements to his wife. When the ‘bear’ finally came into focus, it turned out to be a discarded, rusted oil drum perhaps from an old logging camp. The collective disappointment was palpable, though I noted it was still an operational improvement over a stray cow on Indian tracks.

There was a lively lady on the public-address system, providing continuous commentary on the landscape, history and points of interest. She was enthusiastic and well informed. Nevertheless, I wondered, listening to her formidable commitment to the microphone, whether the landscape might appreciate a little silence.  

At one point, just as the train entered a stretch of breathtaking wilderness after leaving a station, it stopped. Naturally, the railwayman in me immediately became alert. Was it a signal failure? A hot axle? Had the engineer spotted a grizzly on the line? The lady on the PA, however, remained gloriously silent. After a few minutes, one of the staffers stepped down, walked a little way back and returned. The train simply started moving again. I was about to dismiss it as one of those inexplicable railway mysteries of IR variety when the speaker crackled back to life: “Ladies and gentlemen, we had to stop because one of our passengers left a bag full of teddy bears on the platform.” In India, the train would have departed, the teddy bears would have been declared unclaimed property, and a committee of Senior Subordinates would have been formed to establish who was responsible for the incident. In Alaska, apparently, even teddy bears enjoy passenger rights.

By the way, not only are train amenities rather basic, there is no Wi-Fi facilitation with network coverage missing over almost the entire route; presumably therefore, the railway decided that charging points would also be superfluous.

        

                    A collage of images of Alaskan Railways

The restaurant car and 78 desis next door

No railway journey is complete without examining the food. Here, Alaska provided an interesting lesson in democratic catering. The café fare was eminently unmemorable. On our second leg, the coffee machine broke down. Luckily, a desi railwayman is uniquely trained to deal with sudden infrastructure collapse; the counter lady let us heat our own water for tea, using our emergency sachet stash. Civilization, I decided, survives even just south of the Arctic circle.

As we stood waiting at Talkeetna, ruing the pathetic on-board eatery and facing imminent starvation on the long ride to Fairbanks, a voice suddenly cut through the air: "Mooli de paronthe khaoge to dasso?" What? Was this an Arctic mirage?

It turned out a group of about 78 Indian-Americans had booked two entire coaches. They had arrived with a far more adroit understanding of long-distance rail travel, having packed parathas of every conceivable variety: gobhi, paneer, aloo, pyaaz, alongside an aggressive assortment of sabzis and achars. 

We got talking to some of them and immediately began aggressively admiring both their organizational efficiency and their supreme culinary preparedness. I freely confess that I was secretly plotting for the conversation to progress on-board, preferably culminating in the magical phrase, “Please, have some.” Tragically, it never happened. Having spent plenty of time on IR, I know for a fact that when high-stakes food is involved, territorial boundaries are supposed to dissolve completely. Unfortunately, these two coaches were effectively a heavily fortified private republic, and our visa application was denied. Did the aroma occasionally waft into our section of the train? It practically assaulted our hungry palates, leaving us to drool over their gourmet operations from a very respectful distance while we wept over our train-approved diet of whatever sadness, particularly their cold meat sandwiches, was available at the onboard café.

A railway where the scenery wins

The Alaska Railroad is not a high-speed railway, nor is it trying to be one. Despite modern highways, it remains a vital lifeline, transporting passengers and goods to remote, rugged areas. Yet, the train is in no desperate hurry to get anywhere, and neither should you be. It is less a mode of transport and more an organic part of the scenery.

There is something wonderfully humbling about how the tracks cut through immense landscapes where human habitation feels like a rare intrusion. We railwaymen spend our professional lives trying to make trains faster. In Alaska, for once, I was entirely happy to let the wilderness win.

If you visit, I strongly recommend experiencing this journey. You may find the journey long, but when your window frames Denali, the Chugach Mountains, and bridges suspended over endless canyons, speed loses all meaning. Watching the tracks snake along high cliffs over roaring rapids or wind tightly parallel to a braided river valley changes your perspective.

The train may not get you there quickly. It will, however, give you exactly what you need: plenty of time to understand why you came to Alaska in the first place.

...

Ref.

https://anindecisiveindian.blogspot.com/2023/12/readers-might-remember-my-previous-blog.html

https://anindecisiveindian.blogspot.com/2023/11/talgo-trains-in-uzbekistan-much-faster.html

and

https://anindecisiveindian.blogspot.com/2021/06/talgo-and-indias-quest-for-modern-train.html