Alaska Gold Mining: Last Train To Nowhere

Swept up in the enthusiasm generated by the gold rush centered around Nome at the birth of the 20th Century, a group of investors from Chicago decided that a railroad was needed to connect the various gold mining camps in the area… The backers of the project even floated the idea that their little railroad could one day extend all of the way south down to the thriving city of Vancouver, British Columbia.

As Stanton Patty describes it, “Thus was born the Council City & Solomon River Railroad, now ‘The Last Train to Nowhere.’

Soon after the Bering Sea ice retreated in 1903, the steamer Aztec arrived from Seattle with two locomotives that had been retired by the New York Elevated rail system. One of the engines had been manufactured in 1881; the other in 1886. The third locomotive, of similar vintage, arrived the following year.

The Aztec also delivered several box cars and flat cars, plus 51 miles of standard-gauge track, 165,000 ties, 4 million board feet of lumber for trestles, railroad offices, employee housing and a machine shop.

(A technical note: all three locomotives are 23-ton 0-4-4 Forney-type steamers).

By the end of the 1903 construction season, workers completed about 10 miles of main line. A town site was laid out in the port area by the Solomon River, starting point of the Council City & Solomon River Railroad. Soon five saloons, six restaurants and other establishments were open for business. The town was named Dickson, for J. Warren Dickson, the railroad's general manager.

But as the Nome-area gold rush faded, debts began to crush the fledgling railroad. Construction stopped in 1906, with only 35 miles of track in place.

Now there are only the rusting remains of the three locomotives leaning into the tundra a few yards from the icy Bering Sea.

The Last Train to Nowhere... It seems a fitting name."

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Growing up in California’s “Gold Rush Country” made it easy to take all of the history around us for granted. However, abandoned mine sites have a lot working against them – nature, vandals, scrappers and various government agencies… The old prospectors and miners that used to roam our lonely mountains and toil away deep underground are disappearing quickly as well.

These losses finally caught our attention and we felt compelled to make an effort to document as many of the ghost towns and abandoned mines that we could before that colorful niche of our history is gone forever. But, you know what? We enjoy doing it! This is exploring history firsthand – bushwhacking down steep canyons and over rough mountains, figuring out the techniques the miners used and the equipment they worked with, seeing the innovations they came up with, discovering lost mines that no one has been in for a century, wandering through ghost towns where the only sound is the wind... These journeys allow a feeling of connection to a time when the world was a very different place. And I’d love to think that in some small way we are paying tribute to those hardy miners that worked these mines before we were even born.

So, yes, in short, we are adit addicts… I hope you’ll join us on these adventures!

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Видео Alaska Gold Mining: Last Train To Nowhere канала TVR Exploring