Category Archives: Historical

Posts related to the real CR&NW Railway and its history

The Copper River Delta Bridges

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Like everything around here, we can’t talk about the model until we’ve learned a bit about the history of the bridges in the Copper River delta.

The original plan for the Copper River Railroad – Heney’s predecessor purchased by the CR&NW when they gave up on Valdez and Katalla as starting points – was to build up the west side of the Copper River delta, along the edge of the mountains.  The route would have departed from the as-built alignment just west of Flag Point (around milepost 27) and then cross the Copper about half a mile below Child’s Glacier on a bridge that would have been bigger than the famous Million Dollar (Miles Glacier) bridge. The line would have then continued on the as-built right of way over the Miles Glacier bridge and northward.

This avoided crossing the myriad of shifting streams and channels in the delta, but caused so many other problems. Building along the foot of the mountains would have required several miles of snowshed to protect against constant winter avalanches. Heavy rockwork would have been required to build a grade through the base of the mountains. It would have crossed the glacial moraine below Goodwin Glacier, which would have caused ever shifting and sinking trackwork. To top it all off, it would have needed a bridge even more magnificent than the Million Dollar Bridge. Preliminary work showed that the proposed Childs Glacier bridge would need four 400ft spans, one 300 foot span, and possibly two more 200ft spans, and with the same 35+ foot clearances to accomodate calving icebergs and seasonal flooding.

Chief Engineer Hawkins of the CR&NW requested a study to route the line through the Copper River delta instead.  The alternate route would still see heavy snowfall, but no avalanches.  It would also require miles of fill and trestles to cross the swampy terrain.  During the evaluation, though, engineers only identified three places where cheap wooden trestles would not be suitable – Flag Point Channel (milepost 27.1), Round Island Channel (milepost 27.9), and Hot Cake Channel (milepost 33.9), the main flows of the Copper through the region.  The bridges would also only need to be low structures, as river levels only varied 8-10 feet in the lower delta, versus 35 feet at the proposed Childs Glacier crossing.

The Three Channels

The Round Island truss spans back in the day.

Other than the two big bridges at Miles Glacier and Kuskulana, the three bridges in the delta were the only steel bridges on the railroad.

The Flag Point Bridge consisted (from west to east) of a 300 foot Baltimore truss with a curved upper chord connected to two 175ft Pratt trusses, followed by a timber trestle, then another four 150ft Pratt trusses and finally more trestlework to reach Round Island itself.   The Pratt trusses here all had flat upper chords.

Round Island Channel, on the east side of the island, was bridged with a 300ft and a 260ft Baltimore truss.

Finally out at Hot Cake Channel, the railroad crossed another major river flow using a 200ft Pratt truss at the west end, a 150ft trestle, and then two more 200ft Pratt trusses. There was originally a long timber trestle approach on the west end over gravel and sand bars. All of the trusses had arched upper chords.

After the Railroad

As they say, Mother Nature always laughs last.

All of the bridges made it through the railroad years, and were converted to highway use after the line was abandoned.  The Great Earthquake of 1964 rendered them all unusable.  The Flag Point spans all stayed out of the water, but the piers and spans all shifted significantly and suffered subsidence.  The center pier of the two Round Island spans disintegrated, causing the eastern span to be lost into the river, and dropping the center end of the west span in the water. Hot Cake stayed out of the water, but again there was significant damage to the piers and subsidence on both ends. None of this is surprising – my understanding of the concrete construction is that it was just embedded in the gravel under the river without deep supports, and there was little or no reinforcing within the concrete.

Flag Point (right) and Round Island (left) bridges from the air after the 1964 earthquake.

When the highway was rebuilt between 1970-1978, all of the railroad’s bridges were demolished and replaced with modern pre-stressed concrete deck girder bridges sitting on piers of concrete-filled steel columns .   Those all held up relatively well until 2009. Since then, flows on the Copper River have shifted to the east. Those shifting flows have damaged bridge 339 and washed out all of the fill between it and bridge 340. These would have been where the long trestle and Hot Cake Channel bridges originally were. In addition, the shifting channels have washed the right of way into the river up at around milepost 44.

The Copper River delta is a dynamic place, and no matter what gets built, it will be an ongoing battle against the shifting channels and periodic floods to sustain it.

The Model Version

Regardless of if it were rails or highway decking on them, the 1964 earthquake would have done them in – even the ones that didn’t wind up in the water. At the least they would have been removed from their damaged piers and the piers replaced, along with rebuilding all of the approach trestles and earthwork. At worst it would have likely been more cost effective to just rethink the bridges.

Plus there’s the fact that having done the Kuskulana at full scale, Gilahina and Chitina at about two-thirds of full size, and the big Miles Glacier bridge at about half size, I didn’t have a lot of room for more big, to-scale bridges. They already chew up a good part of the total run of the layout, and honestly I’m not that interested in modeling the delta region. There’s nothing operational out there, just miles and miles of glacial sand and gravel with water running through it. The crossings in the delta would need to be just modeled as a symbolic nod.

I finally settled on two truss spans on the side of some generic intermediate island and a single span on the other – nominally reminiscent of Flag Point / Round Island but much smaller. These would just be good old 150 ft. Central Valley Pratt truss spans. As with the other spans, though, I’ve opted to just build 3D-printed stand-ins while I work on the surrounding layout scenery to keep the mainline whole.

3D Models

I actually printed these in three pieces – the lower members, the trusswork, and the bridge ties. Each fits just perfectly diagonally on a Prusa MK3S bed. Also, by making the upper trusswork removable, it made it a lot easier to install the bridges and get the rails cleaned. I then just set the trusswork on for now, though I’ll probably lightly secure it with a few drops of CA.

They’re printed out of just standard black PLA to give them some rigidity, but in order to get good bed adhesion all the way across for the base and bridge ties, I had to bump the bed temp up to 70C. The upper truss was printed upside down, such that the top members were against the bed. I managed to do all of it without any support material. Some of the truss diagonals show a little roughness, but it’s passable for a temporary structure to give me the right look and feel while I work on scenery.

The STLs and F3D source files are posted on here on Thingiverse. All licensed CC-SA, so have fun with whatever you do with them.

Mail Day: CRR Construction Near Eyak

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Copper River Railway construction of cuts and fills around the Odiak Slough basin

Another old postcard recently added to my collection shows the Copper River Railroad (incorrectly labeled Railway on the card) grade on the south side of the Odiak Slough. The Copper River Railroad was the original line built out of Cordova in 1906 by Michael Heney (of WP&YR fame), and sold to the Alaska Syndicate and the Copper River & Northwestern that fall. You have to love those horse-drawn narrow gauge construction cars.

Mail Call – Snowsheds

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Today’s old photo is of the snowsheds over the line, as shot from what appears to be the fireman’s cab window. The lower part of the line receives unbelievable amounts of snow, and where it ran along the steep banks of the Copper River, avalanches were a frequent occurrence. This is the only photo I’ve ever seen of what I believe to be four snowsheds along the Abercrombie Rapids section of the Copper River, just to the north of Miles Glacier bridge.

But there’s the nagging question of which locomotive is it?

That box with the tube sticking up visible at the bottom part of the frame is unmistakably a slide valve on top of a piston, which means this is an early locomotive. Of the CRNW fleet, slide valves limits it to the 0-4-0Ts, 20-22 (23 appears to have piston valves, or perhaps acquired them later in life), 50 (and likely 51 if it existed), and 100-102.

The bevel below the slide valve box into the main cylinder removes the 20s, 50, and the 0-4-0Ts from consideration. So it’s probably one of the 100s, but then there’s the two foot ledges you can see in the picture. That doesn’t fit any of them that I’ve seen pictures of, so perhaps we can’t really tell which engine this is. Thoughts?

Looking south from the cab towards four snowsheds in the lower parts of the Copper River canyon, likely between Abercrombie Rapids and the Miles Glacier Bridge

Mail Call – Steam Shovel and Side Dumps

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A few recently acquired photographs landed in my mailbox today. I’ll post them over the coming weeks. The first one is one of the CR&NW’s steam shovels loading rock into side dump car #13, with car #85 right behind it. The location and date are unknown, but judging by the trees it looks like a forest fire has been through the area recently.

Records of forest fires in Alaska from these early years are pretty sparse, as there was little way to monitor and track them systemically. However, we know the Gilahina Trestle burned in 1915 from the Sourdough Hill fire, which was attributed to the railroad and burned some 384,000 acres from Chitina to Kennecott. There was also the 1915 Kennecott Fire, which burned 64,000 acres between the Kennicott and Nizina rivers. Still that’s just a guess, and even if correct doesn’t really narrow it down.

A CR&NW steam shovel loads rocks into several side dump maintenance cars.

Leaving Cordova in 1913

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Here’s an interesting old photo I picked up last week – a CRNW train leaving the Cordova depot. For those who don’t know, the Cordova depot was located at the bottom of the hill on the south end of First Street. Hand-written notes on the back of the image indicate this is August 8, 1913.

Leaving Cordova on Friday, August 8, 1913

There’s a couple interesting items in this photo. The first and most obvious is the fact the fourth car back from the engine appears to be a house. Zooming in, it appears that the CRNW is moving some sort of structure north on a depressed-center flatcar, and notes on the back call it a “house”.

Other interesting bits are the two GATX tank cars immediately behind the engine, which were used to deliver fuel oil to Kennecott. I wish I could see the number on the rear car, but at least this confirms the CRNW tank cars were GATX. Then behind the house on the flat are six of the 20t Western air dump cars loaded with what appears to be gravel. My guess is that this is gravel from the pit on the north side of the Odiak Slough and the yard being moved up the line for filling trestles and shoring up the early track.

Also of interest is the Cordova station sign. It shows “TO WHARF 1.3 MI”, which makes perfect sense given that the wharf is the end of track. However, on the other side, it shows “TO CHITINA 129.4 MI”. It’s interesting in that this shows the railroad, at least when it was painting this sign, still viewed Chitina as a junction between the railroad’s main line (Cordova to Chitina, with future expansion northward) and a branch over to Kennecott.

Here’s a closeup of the front of the consist:

The Miles Glacier Bridge

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One of the photos I’ve recently acquired is this view of a train approaching the Miles Glacier bridge from the east. It would appear to be a work train that’s returning from carrying ballast, given it consists entirely of the railroad’s Western side-dump gravel cars and a spreader on the back just ahead of the caboose.

Another thing to note is the trestle wye at the east end of the bridge. Most people don’t realize there was a wye here, completely up on trestlework. I also find it interesting that I can’t see the Miles Glacier station at the west end of the bridge, but it may be just out of the photographer’s field view.

What appears to be a ballast train – given all the side-dump cars and the spreader just ahead of the caboose – heads toward Cordova on the east approach to the Miles Glacier Bridge.

Kennicott Through the Years

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I haven’t posted much in the last year, largely because I haven’t done much.  The day job, working on the ProtoThrottle, finishing up my father’s estate and trying to get my mother comfortable with being on her own have consumed much of my life.  I have finished up the smelter complex yard and made some other minor progress elsewhere, but I’ll post separately about that.

As a warning, all of the images linked here are quite large, so that you can blow them up and get down to the finest detail.

A recent acquisition off eBay was this old slide of the Kennecott Mill, taken by an unknown visitor on July 7, 1957.  Overall, the site looks very much like it did when the last train pulled nearly 19 years earlier.  The mill building is all there, including the long ore chute trestles from the upper reaches of the mill straight to the sacking house (where the rail cars were loaded).  The electrical shop is also still there (the building between the sacking house and the little depot hiding in the trees).  The tracks are in (including the 3ft gauge service tram line), the window glass is still there, and the upper floor of the mill, where the ore was received from the tramways, is all intact.  I’ve also included the 1935-1936 site plan from the Historic American Engineering Record files on Kennicott, so that you can use the map to identify the various structures visible and get your bearings.

From the Historic American Engineering Record, National Park Service

The Kennecott Mill site on 7 Jul 1957, photographer unknown, Nathan Holmes collection

The next available photo I have from roughly the right angle dates from 2004, when my grandfather Harold Bryant visited Kennicott.   By this time, the tracks and power lines are gone and National Creek Trestle is looking a bit rough.  The roof on the leaching plant (the building in the foreground on the left side) is in rough shape, and the electrical shop is gone.  The ore chutes are looking a bit rough, but there’s scaffolding so it appears they’re working on the issue.  In addition, the vegetation is a bit out of control on the right where the shop would have been.

The Kennecott Mill site in 2004, taken by Harold Bryant (my grandfather).

And finally, here’s a look during my visit back in September 2015.   The National Creek trestle as seen in my grandfather’s shot was washed away in a flood in 2006, and was subsequently replaced with a modern but reasonably accurate facsimile.  Honestly getting at least 70 years of service out of a trestle isn’t bad.  On the plus side, the general office building has been restored (seen under the blue tarp over the trees in 2004), and the chute from the mill to the leaching plant seems to be in better shape.  The depot also has a fresh coat of paint.  The leaching plant itself, however, is in just as bad of shape, and the ore chutes from the upper parts of the mill have been truncated strangely.

The Kennecott Mill site, as seen during my last visit in early September 2015.

I realize the park service has limited resources, and they do a pretty good job for a large government bureaucracy with a relatively small budget, but looking back 60 years makes me realize how much of a different feel the site has today as opposed to sixty years ago.

Random Early Kennecott Photo

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I don’t really have anything to share about progress on the railroad (my biggest achievement was stringing track power to the track from Gilahina to Strelna), but I did recently acquire an old photo of Kennecott that I’ve never seen before.  It’s clearly from the very early days, as the power plant isn’t built yet and the mill is under construction.  Thought I’d share it with y’all…

kennicott-2

Yes, there’s even more detail in the photo than the medium resolution version the thumbnail links to – you can read the text on the ends of the cars.  However, that version is huge.  If you want it, email me.

The Katalla Branch

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Ever since I drew the original plans a year ago, I’d always had the idea that – should the CRNW have survived – that there might be a branch to Katalla.  As those familiar with the CRNW know, at one point Katalla was to be the terminus of the CRNW.  It had a key advantage for a burgeoning mining industry – nearby coal and oil reserves.  The town lacked one key feature, however – a natural deep-water harbor.

In reality, Katalla’s demise began with the federal government (under President Teddy Roosevelt) withdrawing public lands from coal mining in 1906.  Shortly thereafter, the lands were closed to timber and oil extraction as well.   Then, in November 1907, all of the Katalla dock and breakwater facilities were destroyed in a series of early winter storms.  With no available resources – save a single 160-acre oil field – and no facilities, the CRNW packed up and moved its terminal to Cordova.   Katalla would get a refinery to process the limited (but apparently high quality) crude it produced, but little other industry developed to sustain the town.  By 1933, when the refinery accidentally burned, there were reportedly only about 100 people still living in town.  However, that was the end – after 1933, Katalla would fade into history.

In 1971, however, new hope arose for industry in the Katalla area.  Thanks to the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act and its effort to compensate the Alaska native peoples for their losses, the Bering River bituminous fields and the Carbon Mountain anthracite fields passed to the Chugach Alaska Corporation, one of the regional corporations set up by the ANCSA to administer lands transferred back to the native people.  In 1991, the rights to develop the field were sold to the Korean Alaska Development Corporation as part of CAC’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings.  KADCO has yet to do anything with these rights, and in fact several conservation interests have discussed buying them to prevent any future mine.

Further, the CAC obtained rights to try for commercially-exploitable quantities of oil and gas in the Katalla Field in 1982.  However, these rights were temporary, and expired at the end of 2004 unless a commercial well could be put in production.

In reality, no commercially viable oil well materialized, and the coal fields remain untouched since 1906.  However, with the idea that my modern day CRNW could provide both a customer and a transportation solution, I’m going to explore the idea that at least the coal fields were developed at a small scale.  Local coal seems a plausible energy source for both my processing plant at Eyak, the town of Cordova (which in reality today draws its power from both hydro and a large diesel plant), and the mine operation itself.  Plus, having another local job to run adds more operating interest than just the ore trains and wayfreights plying the mainline.

As much as I’d like the branch to have been developed in the 1920s or 1930s, I’d have to bend history around too much to make that plausible. If the Guggenheims and JP Morgan couldn’t get the Department of the Interior to change their mind about resource extraction in the 1910-1930 era, there’s no plausible reason to believe that it would have happened between 1930 and the transfer of the coal loads to the CAC in 1972.  So, in my version of the world, the Katalla Branch would have been developed in about 1972, once the dust had settled on the ANCSA.

One of the original 1913 Alaska Railroad Commission reports indicates that two routes were considered from the CRNW to the Bering coalfields.  Both would start near the Miles Glacier Bridge.  One route would run around the coastline to Katalla and then back up the Bering River.  The other (shorter) route would run up the Martin River delta, cross over near the foot of the Martin River Glacier, and then pass over some steep grades (estimated at 1.7-2%) and around the western shore of Lake Charlotte.  From there, it would reach the mines and could be extended down towards Katalla.  By 1972, with modern motive power, construction techniques, and the recently-reinforced knowledge of the powerful damage earthquakes could transform the coastline, I have to assume that the the mountain route via Lake Charlotte would have been used.  Plus, there was no reason for the Katalla Branch to actually go to Katalla by that point, as there wasn’t anything left of the town.

My other problem is rather pragmatic – I sketched in the Katalla Branch coming off the mainline between Alaganik and the Miles Glacier Bridge.  In reality, it would have diverged in this area, coming off the mainline after it had crossed the braided tributaries of the Copper on the north/east side of Long Island.  The problem is that’s located at the end of the peninsula on my layout, and I can’t come up with a good way to helix the track down at that point.  There’s just too much benchwork needed to support the peninsula to start putting holes in it.

I don’t intend trains coming off the branch to ever be particularly long – maybe 8 cars plus engines and caboose, to be roughly in proportion to mainline trains at 20ish cars.  Plus, back-of-the-cocktail-napkin calculations show that creating 200 tons of pure copper a day via electrowinning would take roughly 4-5 cars of coal per day, given typical generation efficiencies.  So if I could pull 8 cars out every op session, that seems reasonable to feed the whole shebang.

Enter the train elevator.  Basically a strip of track 55-60 inches in length, mounted to a wood carriage that rides on two linear rails.  A pair of stepper motors and jackscrews raise and lower the track between the two decks.  I intend to make it 99% automated, so that the train pulls in, power gets cut when it hits a sensor, and the elevator takes it to the other level.  From an operator’s point of view, they’ll leave Katalla Junction and disappear into the trees, and a minute or so later pop out of a summit tunnel or cut on the very lowest deck.

There’s absolutely nothing like it in the prototype.  I know and accept that.  I wouldn’t want one on the mainline – the main decks will be connected via a proper helix – but it seems an acceptable way to add time (otherwise the supposedly 38+ mile branch would only be maybe 15 feet long) and an easy connection to what amounts to a long industrial spur.  It gives me a plausible connection to local fuel producer, and a reason to run another local job every op session or two.

I’ve got the rails, the screws, and the stepper motors – now it’s just a matter of getting all the other widgets (screws, brackets, etc.), designing some controls, and testing it out.  I’ll let you know what comes of it.

Kennicott vs. Kennecott

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For those of you who think I can’t use a spell checker, I thought I should clarify something.  There really are two distinct spellings of “Kennicott” – one with an ‘i’, one with an ‘e’.

  • Kennicott refers to either the river or the glacier.  The name comes from Robert Kennicott (1835-1866), an early explorer and naturalist who made two trips to the Alaska-Yukon region (at the time, Russian America).  His first trip in 1859 was purely scientific, having been tasked with collecting specimens of animals yet unknown back east.  Given his experience in the area, Western Union hired him in 1865-1866 to lead a scouting expedition to site a telegraph line the western United States up to the Bering Strait, where it would connect with a submarine cable and a similarly long line across Siberia to Europe.  (Kennicott died of a suspected heart attack in 1866 near Fort Nurato in northwestern Alaska, and the telegraph project was never completed.)
  • Kennecott refers to the Kennecott Copper Company or the company town at the base of the mill.  The ‘e’ was a misspelling on the incorporation paperwork that has persisted in the company’s name to this day.

Honestly, the mine and the town are referred to by both spellings, and it all gets used interchangeably.  I try to be at least consistent, but I guarantee a truly pedantic editor will find me abusing that principle at least a few places on this site.