McCarthy Update

My first post on McCarthy in 2016 is here. In revisiting the subject, I've found a good many additional photos that shed much more light on the railroad facilities there. The first is a photo of the depot pre-1938, with a speeder on the track in front of it:

You can see what is apparently the freight house to the left of the depot and the end of the engine house at the far left. Next is a crop from an aerial photo of McCarthy taken in 1938 at nearly the end of operations:

The main line headed to Kennicott runs from lower left to top center. A spur runs from behind the depot at center left down to Shoshana Street. The building with the diamond windows at the far lower left along the spur is called the Mother Lode Warehouse. This still stood in the 1950s, and speeder excursions to Kennicott from McCarthy seem to have used it as a starting point:

The engine house is at the upper center. The turntable is at the far right just below the enginehouse. Several other railroad structures appear above the enginehouse. What looks like a mikado is on the spur leading to the turntable.

The spur that led past the Mother Lode Warehouse went farther down along Shoshana Street to the Mother Lode Power plant. This is visible with the stack at the far left of this view:

This building has its own entry on Wikipedia:

The McCarthy Power Plant, also known as the Mother Lode Coalition Mining Company Power House and the Mother Lode Plant, is a historic power plant building in the small community of McCarthy, Alaska, in the heart of Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve. It is a three-story wood frame structure with a clerestory roof, located on the banks of McCarthy Creek. It was built in 1917, after the arrival of the Copper River and Northwestern Railway in the area kicked of a building boom. The coal-fired power plant was built to provide electricity for the operation of a tramway and other facilities of the Kennecott mines. Most of the transmission lines and the tramway were destroyed by avalanches in 1919, and other changes made soon afterward made the power plant unnecessary, and its turbine was moved up to Kennecott.

The presence of the stack probably dates the photo to the period 1917-1919. Here is a more recent photo:

The building still exists. Here is a plat view of this part of town as it currently exists:

Equipment: Pile Drivers

Because the Copper River & Northwestern laid a lot of initial trackage on pile trestles that were filled in, as well as maintaining trestles over wide alluvial deposits, it had a number of pile drivers. Some were rail mounted, while others were on skids. All seem to have been home built, with some fairly substantial like the one below in Cordova during the construction period:

The one below could be an upgraded version of the one above, or something entirely new. It's being pushed by a 70 class loco in later years.

The same unit is shown below, also in later years:

The one below looks like it's been disassembled for transport. It has either a crude wooden structure or a tent covering the hoisting machinery, with parts of the driver itself laid out on flat cars. In fact, the whole assembly seems to be mounted on skids and loaded on the flat car. This is a construction-era train at Tiekel, the end of track as of 1910.

In later years, it appears that at least one pile driver was permanently located at the Copper River bridge at Chitina. This regularly washed out and must have needed constant work.

Two skid-mounted pile drivers working toward each other. The one nearest the camera seems to be the skid-mounted one shown in the photo at Tiekel:

An early view at the McCarthy trestle. The pile driver seems to be the larger one in the photos above.

Katalla Update

Since my major effort on this blog in 2015, I've revisited other possible sources on the web, and new information and photos have come to light. However, the previous posts were made under an older version of Blogger and HTML, and I find I can't easily update existing posts without reloading photos. In some cases, this would be a major task. As a result, i'll be doing updates with new posts unless circumstances require a more complete re-edit.

This cropped version of a 1917 USGS map shows what is probably the completed line of the Katalla project as of 1907. Some of the track and equipment appears to have been in some type of operation at the time as the Alaska Anthracite Railroad:

Here is a map of th 1906 survery:

Although much of the equipment used to start the original Copper River and Northwestern project in Katalla was moved to Cordova after the 1907 storms by the Morgan-Guggenheim syndicate, some was left in Katalla. This included at least some wooden coal or gravel dump cars and at least one locomotive. According to Wikipedia,

The Alaska Anthracite Railroad Company was formed about 1907 by several people to exploit the Bering River coal fields after the Alaska Syndicate that consisted of M. Guggenheim & Sons and J.P. Morgan & Co. left the area for the Copper River copper. It was after the 1907 winter storm destroyed their Copper River and Northwestern Railway (CR&NW) in the Katalla - Palm Point area and access to the Bering River coal fields.

However, since the US government had withdrawn the coal leases in the Bering River fields, getting access required effort, and the new group made progress only by 1916.

It appears that in 1916 the Alaska Anthracite Railroad Company began building their railroad from the Controller Bay area to the coal fields about 20 miles to the north. The railroad actually began at a place called Goose City on the Bering River. There were plans to extend it south to Controller Bay, but it never happened.

The Wikipedia entry says the railroad lasted in some form until 1922. Here are two photos I've found of equipment that was left behind by the Katalla Company on the south side of the Copper River before construction of the Copper River and Northwestern began on the north side in Cordova, which seems to have had some continued use by the later project. The larger cars in the left rear appear to be Hart ballast cars.

Above is a 1922 photo of a Dickson loco and other equipment that was left behind at Katalla.

Here is a later photo from the air of the same equipment, much deteriorated. A more complete discussion of the Katalla project appears in this post.