Digital Bob Archive

Alaska's first railroad was on Douglas Island, if the Juneau City Mining Record for June 6, 1889, has its facts straight. It was due for completion within a few days, the paper said, and its steam locomotive was already on hand. The railroad was owned by the Alaska Gold Company which was proposing to open the Bear's Nest mine, on the Douglas side of the Treadwell mine. It ran from the Douglas sawmill, behind Mayflower Island, to the wharf of the Alaska Mill & Mining Company, the corporate name of the Treadwell operation. The railroad was something less than a mile in length.

The only money made from the Bear's Nest was through the sale of stock by promoters, and the railroad, including the rolling stock, was eventually sold to the Treadwell people who expanded it and used it until 1917 when the mine caved in. So far as is known, that road was never electrified and continued to use one or more little steam engines. Horses and mules were used to pull ore cars underground.

Two rather extensive electric railroads were operated on the Juneau side of the channel, commencing around 1913. One was owned by Alaska Gastineau Mining Company and ran from the Perseverance mine, at the head of Gold Creek, through a two-mile tunnel to the Sheep Creek Valley and on to the mill near tidewater.
The other road was owned by the Alaska Juneau Mining Company and hauled ore from the mine, also in the Gold Creek Valley, to the mill just south of town.

But there were at least two early-day proposals that, if they had been carried to completion, would have put railroad tracks on the streets of Juneau.

The first of these was in connection with a proposed crossing of Gastineau Channel; not a second crossing, but the first one. Talk of the first crossing started in the 1880s and took the better part of 50 years to materialize. The Juneau, Douglas and Treadwell Railroad Company was incorporated in 1902. The road was proposed to start on Front Street in Juneau, run through a tunnel at the west end of the street, then follow the shoreline to the vicinity of the Mendenhall Bar where it would cross the channel on piling before heading south to Douglas and Treadwell. Apparently no actual construction work was done.

Another proposed railroad, this one a narrow-gauge electric, was to have begun construction in the spring of 1907. In its first phase it was to start at the City Dock - the present ferry terminal - and run up Franklin Street to connect with Basin Road, then on up the Gold Creek Valley to Silver Bow Basin and the Perseverance Mine. There was talk of a second phase that would have taken it from the City Dock to Sheep Creek.

The railroad, it was said, would carry ore from several mines along Gold Creek either to the wharf for shipment south, or to a mill to be built somewhere on the channel. It was also to have had passenger cars to carry sightseers up the valley, but like numerous other local transportation schemes, it never materialized.