If the government pushes with money, they will get what the money buys. If they don
I realize, of course, that this is off topic and I don’t wanna see this thread wander too far so no one need respond, but there is a reason why the north shore of Lake Superior reminded you of Alaska.
Due to a quirk in North American weather and climate, the most bitter cold air from the interior of AK and the Yukon, dips way down south in the interior of the continent to the vicinity of the Great Lakes. If you go just a couple o’ hundred miles north of where I am (northern Indiana) it gets very nearly as cold as Fairbanks.
The all-time historic low for the state of Minnesota is in a little town called Tower (-60°F). That is only a mere six degrees shy of Fairbanks’s all time record low of -66°. In my mind’s eye, that’s still pretty doggone cold~! Hearst, Ontario probably gets even colder than that.
When those bitter cold winds sweep down out of the northwest, in order to reach me, they have to first pass over Lake Michigan. That moistens and warms the air somewhat.
The result? The worst I’ve ever seen it here is -26°F. But in my book that’s still pretty doggone cold, especially with a 25-30MPH wind blowing~! On a day like t
-40F and maybe a little colder here. And I’ve been out in it fighting fires. Yuck. That cold is a problem with our locomotives - they have plain water for coolant, so if they don’t have an auxiliary heater (several of ours do), they stay running in that sort of weather…
Well, all the evidence that I can find so far is that there are still people pushing for a rail connection. The plan has been on-again, off-again, on-again since at least the 1960s. It now appears as if we’re once again back to “off-again”.
There is clearly a need for ground transportation between the lower 48, northwest Canada and Alaska. After all, they built the Alcan Highway, didn’t they? This gets back to what I’d posted on the “Trump” thread. There always appears to be PLENTY of money for more and progressively bigger highways but rail is another matter.
The problem is one of consensus. Liberal, progressive environmentalists do not want to see a railroad built at all. “Right-wing” conservatives, on the other hand, strongly believe that the government should not get directly involved with railways – highways are fine, but not rail.
I am beginning to wonder if this highway-centric mentality isn’t beginning to change somewhat. There are few countries in western Europe beginning to question this. The U.K. is looking to expand rail and is even looking at reactivating some long ago abandoned lines.
A few rare countries like Japan and Switzerland never quite completely accepted the idea that cars, trucks and highways should provide 100% of all our transportation needs.
I understand your point and I could have made my point more clear. There certainly are times when if you build it, they will come. And the pioneering railroad expansion boom was successful example of that, at least up to the point of oversaturation. But I was referring to the saying; “Build it and they will come” used when the builder does not actually know whether the market demand is there. Instead they assume that the demand is always there and never completely fulfilled. Generally, it takes a lot market research to determine if there is enough demand for a new business.
But when developers are using someone else’s money to build something, they might use the phrase, ‘Build it and they will come” to sell the idea to the investor. I recall getting that impression from the way A2A RAIL was promoting their project when we were first made aware of it in 2020.
From reading the proposal by A2A RAIL in 2020, I got the impression that they were promoting their project largely on the basis of “Build it and they will come.” In the 2020 thread, I said this in response to a question to me by Dave Klepper asking about mineral
Certainly the only real justification for building it as a single-track railroad is “build it and they will come on line” – mines being the principal thing producing any more traffic than, say, the Port Churchill line. I doubt there is anyone that would consider the latter an ‘economically justified’ service…
The Alcan Highway was built as a wartime project, and I am reminded of the Burma Road and the Japanese railway project to accomplish the same general purpose (see Bridge on the River Kwai) and how that worked out.
A highway permits local access or branches at nearly any point, and there is comparatively little restriction on people with appropriate ‘ice road’ equipment operating at an infinitesmal fraction of a percent of the amortized cost of an A2A or G7G line. There is comparatively fast and simple response to wrecks or accidents, too. I haven’t seen a discussion in either company’s collateral of how a serious derailment in winter would be handled – you can’t fly in Hulcher side-booms with big drones, even if there were room adjacent to the track to work them effectively. For a start.
Well, I guess they’d have to find a way to address that concern. That is indeed a genuine concern but hardly a problem that by itself would prevent the construction and operation of such a line.
How does the Alaska Railroad handle a derailment? They run through some really wild back country, occassionally on the opposite side of the river from the highway. Doesn’t the Quebec North Shore & Labrador also run through some pretty wild back country?
In a perfect world, the utimate and ideal solution is simply: DON’T HAVE A DERAILMENT. I’m not sure why, but derailments seem to have become a major issue in the industry. (See nearby threads).
Just a few points…
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Alaska already has a railroad. It connects with a seaport, the one form of transport that has lower costs than railroads. No reason to make it an all-rail route where there isn’t much intermediate online business.
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The problem with the weather in Alaska isn’t the absolute lowest temperatures; it’s the length of the winter. The upper Midwest may get frigid temps, but they don’t last for months.
On your second point, I believe this is true. Northern Minnesota has the potential to get as cold as Fairbanks, but winters in Minnesota are not as long. Usually. As an RV parts rep, I was talking on the telephone with a client in Duluth, MN following the hard winter of 2013-14. She told me there were still small chunks of ice floating on Lake Superior in mid June. YIKES ~ !
On your first point, those are good points as well. Some would not see the need for a rail link to the lower 48. But others clearly do. Why? Pride, maybe? Could some Alaskans feel kinda lonely, isolated from the rest of us, and a railroad connection might psychologically aleviate some of their isolation? I don’t know.
I’d love to be able to discuss this with someone promoting a rail connection to get their point of view.
Who knows? It might happen eventually but I don’t see it happening in the next 20 years and certainly not within ten.
If Alaskans feel “lonely”, they can just jump on an Alaska Airlines flight. They fly to 20 destinations in Alaska.
Many people have a dream of building a railroad to Alaska, but it seems that none of them have their own money and they can’t get the people with the money, to lend it to them. There must be a reason…
O.K. I warn you all. This is really off-topic here but I just want to share this. If any of you like to read (as in books) I found the book Alaska’s Wolfman a really super fun read. I had never before thought much about Alaska but after reading this, and later Into the Wild, I concluded I’d love to go up there some time. But I’m not sure that’ll ever happen.
If I were in my 20s again, I might even try living up there. What would be really neat is if someone could have a second home in Fairbanks or somewhere and just live there from mid March to mid October every year. Then going “home” to northern Indiana would seem like going to Florida for the winter ~ !
Here you go:
To bring this thread back on topic after my last off-topic post (I’ll let the moderator delete it if he so chooses), a golden opportunity to build a line to Alaska may have been forever lost.
“Opportunity knocks but once”, as the writer in the Anchorage online news stated.
I seem to remember that back in the late 1960s, the CNR, which was actually owned by the Canadian government at that time, was all prepared to build to Alaska. Indeed, if I’m remembering this right, some preliminary work was actually done in British Columbia.
However, President Richard Nixon (aka “Tricky Dick”) was vehemently opposed to having a Canadian government-owned railroad build on American soil in Alaska, and he effectively killed the project.
I recall thinking at the time that this whole fiasco was beyond stupid. Stupid, ‘cause Nixon failed to realize that the CNR already owned and operated four railroads in the lower 48 states. So, the precedent was already there. Or, perhaps he did know and didn’t care or maybe he killed the scheme for some other reason and just used this as an excuse.
Are any of you on this list old enough to remember any of this? If so, I’d like to hear clarification because I’m trying to remember something from o
From Wikipedia:
Calls were made to extend the branch more than 1,000 miles (1,600 km) north through the Yukon and into Alaska to join the federally-owned Alaska state railroad.[27] An Alaska state study outlined numerous economic benefits from developing mineral resources and suggested it could become a trunk line to Alaska ports.[28] Although preliminary studies showed the project financially feasible and environmentally sound, the BC government displayed no appetite for further financial commitments.[29] It regarded financing as primarily the responsibility of the U.S. federal and Alaskan governments, with some contribution by the Canadian gove
Mr. Cain, so you choose not to go “North to Alaska” but rather “Back Home Again in Indiana?” [8D]
[quote user=“York1”]
Fred M Cain
Are any of you on this list old enough to remember any of this? If so, I’d like to hear clarification because I’m trying to remember something from over 50 years ago now.
From Wikipedia:
Calls were made to extend the branch more than 1,000 miles (1,600 km) north through the Yukon and into Alaska to join the federally-owned Alaska state railroad.[27] An Alaska state study outlined numerous economic benefits from developing mineral resources and suggested it could become a trunk line to Alaska ports.[28] Although preliminary studies showed the project financially feasible and environmentally sound, the BC government displayed no appetite for further financial commitments.[29]
[quote user=“Fred M Cain”]
Murphy Siding
For a bit of perspective, the north shore of Lake Superior reminds me of where we lived in Alaska- mountains, trees, and water.
I realize, of course, that this is off topic and I don’t wanna see this thread wander too far so no one need respond, but there is a reason why the north shore of Lake Superior reminded you of Alaska.
Due to a quirk in North American weather and climate, the most bitter cold air from the interior of AK and the Yukon, dips way down south in the interior of the continent to the vicinity of the Great Lakes. If you go just a couple o’ hundred miles north of where I am (northern Indiana) it gets very nearly as cold as Fairbanks.
The all-time historic low for the state of Minnesota is in a little town called Tower (-60°F). That is only a mere six degrees shy of Fairbanks’s all time record low of -66°. In my mind’s eye, that’s still pretty doggone cold~! Hearst, Ontario probably gets even colder than that.
When those bitter cold winds sweep down out of the northwest, in order to reach me, they have to first pass over Lake Michigan. That moistens and warms the air somewhat.
The extraction industries up there use trucks.
What was the last private extraction railroad built in North America?
The US Gypsum 3’ narrow gauge railroad is still in operation on a 26-mile line between Plaster City, CA and a gypsum mine in Imperial County, CA.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UAmsqGkOBkc
Southwestern Portland Cement operates an approximately 7-mile long standard gauge line from Victorville, CA to a quarry.
And while not exactly extraction, US Sugar operates a network of sugar cane gathering branches in south central Florida.
This video has their former Florida East Coast 4-6-2 No. 148 hauling some cane trains. Normally the cane trains are hauled by diesel.
Minntac uses a mix of rail and trucks in its mining operations on the Range. Diesel-electric dump trucks work the pits while rail is used between a transfer site and the beneficiation plant.
Well, I think most of us on this group can agree building such a long line would be astronomically expensive. I mean, a THOUSAND miles of road? That’s a lot of railroad construction. Whether it would be really worth the effort and pay for itself over the long run is a question and involves a certain amount of speculation. Would it or wouldn’t it? I don’t think we really know. But railroad history is full of lines that were built out of pure speculation. Some panned out well; many did not.
One thing I’ve wondered about, if enough minerals and forest products were shipped south to the lower 48, that might actually benefit the railroads in the lower 48 states more than it would the line itself by providing a source of traffic that would be difficult for trucks to compete with. 100 carloads of lumber shipped from Alaska or the Yukon to New England or Florida would indeed boost traffic down here, not so?
One thing we haven’t discussed yet is the logistics issue of crossing an international border twice for traffic that would both originate and terminate in th