Evening Republican, Volume 16, Number 212, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 September 1912 — NEEDS GREAT COURAGE [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

NEEDS GREAT COURAGE

PHRILB PACED BY RAILROAD BUILDERS IN ALASKA. Storms, Glacier* and Mud Are Soma of the Difficulties Which Are Overcome in the Far North. The building of the Copper River railway In Alaska Is something new

it the record even o ’ pioneer con--stmctloßr — The road goes into-t&e heart of a region where "living” glaciers discharge millions of tons of ice a day and where, according to a writer in the ..Overland Monthly, the builders

of the line are laying off the permanent roadbed itself on ice. There are several thousand square miles of glaciers still in Alaska. If the walking were good, enough one could tramp northward from the sea 600 miles without leaving the ice and could branch off on side, trips of several hundred miles in various directions with icse always under foot. But it isn’t the ice.'St least not as ice. that Jjas made the task of the railroad builders so hazardous. Every Buriimer masses of the glaciers break off so that tffgy are rapidly retreating. But that only makes conditions worse for the men who are fighting their way across this remnant of a frozen age. For not only is the ice reduced from a fairly permanent to a most unstable and dangerous material by the’ summer warmth but the land is reduced by water to its least navigable condition. The pushing of the railroad over the Coppe'r river flats involved enough dogged courage to supply a dozen books of old-fashioned romance. These soft, shifting. Bilt beds, with their innumerable river channels and quicksands, are impassable in summer to either man or beast. This was winter work. There were twenty miles of storm swept flats, covered with eight or ten feet of snow, alternately flooded with water and frozen solid. Over or through this it was necessary to move not only men and horses but hundreds of tons of supplies, ,timbers- and pile drivers. Sometimes rails were laid on brush piled on the snow. In other places ten feet of snow was shoveled away for track laying. As spring broke the flats became a lake of slush and water and still the ■work went forward. .The moving of supplies ahead of track laying became Increasingly difficult with warm weather. To get in horses, for instances, scows just large enough to hold one animal were built and towed ity launch across the river channels. Long lines were then attached and the loaded scows towed by force of main strength over the soft mud and quicksand where men could hardly find foothold and horses would hopelessly mire. A mile an hour was often good average 1 time for this traveling, even with a big crew of every horse, and it went on hour after hour and day after day. But this was all below the glaciers. At the three-mile face of Miles glacier the river is contracted within a deep narrow channel. Hour after hour through the summer this glacier discharges bergs into the stream, making a wgsh that climbs a hundred feet up the opposite bank. Nothing can stand before it. Just above Miles glacier the river makes a sharp double turn and on the other side meets another great discharging glacier. Between these two Ice cliffs the railroad runs. The problems involved are unique in railroad construction. Where the river is bridged between the glaciers the channel is 1,500 feet wide, and piers must be set that would withstand the pounding of the enormous bergs from Childs besides the field ice which is In a fif-teen-mile current often six feet deep. These piers were built of solid concrete reinforced with heavy steel rails .set a foot apart all around and they were carried sixty feet to bedrock. Their greatest horizontal dimension also is sixty feet. In addition the piers are protected by concrete breaks also sunk to bedrock and of unexamplied solidity. Just above the river at this point a long and rather high trestle was required. and in order to fulfill a contract this had to be built after winter had set in. With the thermometer around zero and a fifty to sixty-mile wind beating a heavy snowstorm almost horizontally the men worked on this trestle, while on the level the wind gathered snow and gravel into a frightful mixture and hurled it at the workers with terrific‘fury. One hour was a long shift. Engines were stalled and had to be dug out. Shovel era sometimes could make no headway whatever against the flying drifts in digging out supplies. For days the wind blew more than eighty miles an hour and then no man could face it. Eighty miles of warm wind is too much for moßt people. At zero and well mixed with ice and gravel it is too much even tor an Alaskan.