College Station in the mid-1920s. The four miles between the University of Alaska and downtown Fairbanks offers little impediment to modern travelers. However, when the university’s predecessor, the Alaska College of Agriculture and...
A small industrial locomotive in front of the railroad depot in Palmer is a reminder of the Matanuska Valley’s coal-mining past. Engine No. 5 is a narrow-gauge Baldwin 0-4-0T saddletank locomotive. The 0-4-0 represents...
About 14 miles southwest of Wasilla on the western shore of Cook Inlet’s Knik Arm lies the hamlet of Knik. Its history may be most linked with the 1910 Iditarod Gold Rush and the...
Healy Hotel, now Princess Tours employee housing, in 2012 Most people driving the Parks Highway through Healy have no idea they can see a historic structure from the road. However, the two-story building just...
Harding Car at Pioneer Park in 1996 Many Fairbanskans have probably seen the “Denali” Pullman car on display at Pioneer Park, but how many know its history? It was part of the...
Once upon a time (80 odd years ago) there was a tiny depot by the railroad tracks near what was then the Alaska Agricultural College and School of Mines (now the University of Alaska)....
Nenana depot as it looked in 2012 In March 1914, Congress authorized the construction of a government railroad in the Territory of Alaska. The northern terminus of the railroad would be in Fairbanks,...
When the tug boat Taku Chief began its career in Southeast Alaska in 1938, the age of steamboating on Interior Alaska rivers was dying. Gold mining, which had spurred a few decades of frenetic...
I an convinced that Alaska would not be nearly so developed had it not been for “government surplus.” At least in the Railbelt and Southcentral, military surplus vehicles and other equipment helped Alaskans survive....
TVRR Engine No. 1 at Pioneer Park in Fairbanks When Falcon Joslin, the mastermind behind the Tanana Valley Railroad, began work on the line in 1904, he envisioned a railroad stretching from Fairbanks to...
