Yakutat and Southern Railroad

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Yakutat & Southern RR
Legend
   
 Yakutat AK
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Lost River AK
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 Situk AK
Yakutat and Southern Railroad Company locomotive. Yakutat, Alaska. 1907

The Yakutat and Southern Railroad (Y SRR) is a former railroad in Alaska ( United States ). It existed as an independent company from 1903 to around 1965. The company's headquarters were initially in Seattle , and from 1951 in Bellingham .

history

After a canning factory was built in Yakutat , they needed a means of transport that could move the fresh fish caught in Situk and Lost Rivers quickly there. For this reason, Seattle businessmen founded the Yakutat and Southern Railroad on January 22, 1903 . The route planning was completed in April 1904 and construction began soon after. In the same year the approximately 17-kilometer standard-gauge line from Yakutat to Situk went into operation. A branch to Lost River completed the route network.

Due to the fact that the fishery was only operated seasonally, the railway only operated from May to October. The timetable was based on the tides . Most of the fishermen in the region lived in Yakutat. The railway therefore offered free passenger transport from Yakutat to Lost River and Situk.

During the Second World War, the railway was used by the military from October 1940 to April 1941 as a means of transport for building materials, as a military airfield and barracks were built near the route. After the tracks were increasingly poorly maintained and fell into disrepair, the railway had to be shut down in the mid-1960s. The transport of fish was shifted to the road, the passenger traffic had already been stopped before 1949.

Name of the company

The official name of the railway was Yakutat and Southern Railroad Company , which was also used on the vehicles. In the timetables, however, the operation was called Yakutat and Southern Railway .

vehicles

Initially, the railway had a Forney steam locomotive with a 0-4-2 wheel arrangement and road number 1092 (Y & SRR No. 1), which was probably previously used on the Elevated Railway in New York City. The locomotive soon proved to be inadequate and in 1907 it was retired and scrapped. Instead, a "Heisler" type locomotive built in the same year was acquired and later a Lima Prairie with a 2-6-2 wheel arrangement. It originally had the road number 1057, at the Y & SRR it was given the number 2.

Since the locomotive used around two tons of coal to travel from Yakutat to Situk and back, it was decommissioned in 1949 and replaced with an in-house design made from an old truck, a gas engine and the chassis of the old Heisler locomotive. There was no longer a permanent train driver. Anyone with a truck driver's license was allowed to drive the train.

To turn the locomotive, there was a hand-operated turntable in Situk .

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credentials

  1. ↑ Mike Walker: Comprehensive Railroad Atlas of North America. Pacific Northwest. SPV-Verlag, Dunkirk (GB), 1998.
  2. ^ A b Official Guide of the Railways and Steam Navigation Lines of the United States, Porto Rico, Canada, Mexico and Cuba. Issued February 1934. Yakutat & Southern Railway. Page 1124.
  3. ↑ Official Guide of the Railways and Steam Navigation Lines of the United States, Puerto Rico, Canada, Mexico and Cuba. Issued November 1964. Yakutat & Southern Railway. Page 773.

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