It was late last night when I was about to turn in when a trailer for an upcoming show flashed across the screen, there is a series called “Tougher in Alaska” on the National Geographic Channel, I don’t know a lot about the series because I have not watched it before but when they showed the Alaska Rail line and talked about some 400+ miles of rails used to connect the tundra to Canada through some of the roughest conditions known to rail roading I just had to see this show so I forced myself to stay up and boy am I happy I did.
They showed some awesome footage of the beautiful Yellow and Blue Alaskan Locomotives and the scenic train cars used for vacationers to view Alaska in comfort, there was a lot of footage on how the tracks are maintained and that was pretty interesting, the tools haven’t really changed all that much since the beginning of that rail line being installed.
The host gets to try and work along side the real rail crew and he took his turn at trying to drive in some spikes and before he was to take his first swing he was given an interesting monolog regarding making sure not too hit the rail out of gage, I thought that was really neat, he did a good job but watching the real rail men swing that sledge was amazing, they could sink a spike with one or two hits and just kept moving on down the line with the rhythm of a drummer.
Another interesting segment was when they showed an automatic rail layer in action I guess it works well but in the best of conditions, the narrator stated that the rails were still mainly laid by hand and the auto layer couldn’t be used in really rough terrain.
The segment on the snow clearing crew was awesome.
The rail line has some of the most unforgiving natural challenges that a rail line could face, the 400 mile track runs right through avalanche alley and the coverage on the howitzer crew that blasts the avalanche heads causing them to come down safely was wild, they use an actual WW2 Howitzer cannon holy cow!
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