Train Set: Track Two

Next Stop: Hurricane Turn, Alaska

Way up in Alaska, there’s this one particular train that works differently from probably most trains people have ever taken – it operates on what’s known as a flagstop basis. A flagstop train is basically a train that stops on demand – when someone needs to get off or get on. And this route in Alaska is one of the last of its kind in all of North America!

It’s a bit like flagging down a bus, except a bus also has scheduled stops, and isn’t massive and heavy and incredibly hard to slow down. To help make things easier, the train sheds most of its cars along this rural stretch of its route, leaving only two locomotives, two passenger cars, and one baggage car, making it easier to start and stop.

A lot of passengers are just visitors who are heading out to hike or fish in remote areas for maybe even a couple of weeks at a time. But the railway also provides a vital service for those brave, brave souls who live way out here in rural Alaska along this stretch.

Folks who use the train to get to and from homes in the region also need this route to get supply drops. There’s one service, however, that doesn’t require stopping at all: newspaper delivery! Basically, there’s a rail worker who stands there and tosses out print newspapers for area residents from the moving train!

Final Stop: Bering Strait, Pacific Ocean

For over a century, there have been various proposals to connect eastern Russia and Alaska across the Bering Strait project that would have to spend a bit over 50 miles and would tie North America to Asia in this unprecedented way. Of course, in the current political climate, it’s probably more a pipe dream, but it would be a world changing feat of engineering. And it would be one thing to try and build a set of bridges to span that length, but one of the plans that keeps coming up is actually an underground (and underwater) rail tunnel, which would be something like 20 miles longer than the Chunnel.

With politics and trade in mind, some pretty serious folks pitched various plans for over a century. In the late 1890s, for example, you had Joseph Strauss – who went on to design over 400 bridges, and become the project engineer for the Golden Gate Bridge – who first did his underground thesis on a Bering Strait Bridge. Then in 1905, a more fully fleshed-out plan was all but approved, but got axed at the last minute as the Russian Revolution kicked off. And ever since, from cold wars to hot ones, tensions with the West have been high more often than not.

And then, too, there is little on either side at the points that are closest to each other from like these nations. Plus, if they built a bridge, it would probably also have to be closed down for much of the year because it is so cold up there. And if you went the train route instead, they need to figure out how to reconcile these different gauges for each country. And if they went the tunnel route, well, a 50 mile tunnel would be an incredible undertaking and would set a world record.