Photo by Enrico Blasutto, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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About Tanana Valley Railroad
At Pioneer Park in Fairbanks you can stand beside, and on lucky days watch in steam, Engine No. 1: an 1899 narrow gauge locomotive that was the first in Fairbanks and the Yukon and remains Alaska's oldest working steam engine. The Tanana Valley Railroad Museum tells the story of the gold-rush short line the engine served, and volunteers still run it on special occasions.
History
The Tanana Valley Railroad was interior Alaska's pioneering short line, a three-foot narrow gauge road serving the gold country around Fairbanks from 1905 to about 1917. Incorporated in 1904 as the Tanana Mines Railway by builder Falcon Joslin, hailed as the "Harriman of the North," it finished its first section in 1905 — Judge Wickersham spoke at the golden spike gala and Mrs. Isabelle Barnett accepted the spike — and took the Tanana Valley name in 1907. The company slid into bankruptcy and was liquidated around 1917, when the U.S. government bought the property; the Alaskan Engineering Commission converted the Fairbanks-Happy section to dual gauge to complete the standard gauge route from Seward to Fairbanks, which became the Alaska Railroad in 1923, and the old narrow gauge survived as the Chatanika Branch until 1930. Preservation today centers on Engine No. 1, the first steam locomotive in Fairbanks and the Yukon: retired in 1922, it was restored between 1997 and 2000, gained its own museum building at Pioneer Park in 2005, and in 2019 starred at a 120th-birthday reenactment of the railroad's Golden Spike ceremony.
The Trains
The star of the collection is Tanana Valley Railroad Engine No. 1, a three-foot narrow gauge steam locomotive built in 1899 that was the first steam engine in Fairbanks and the Yukon and is now the oldest working steam locomotive in Alaska. Retired in 1922, No. 1 was restored between 1997 and 2000 and is displayed in the Tanana Valley Railroad Museum building at Pioneer Park, opened for the engine in the mid-2000s. It is still fired up several times a year and run on occasion by volunteers — including a 2019 appearance under steam for its 120th birthday.
Nearby
The museum sits inside Pioneer Park, a 44-acre free-entry city park along the Chena River that gathers much of Fairbanks's history in one place — a Gold Rush Town of relocated early buildings, the sternwheeler SS Nenana, the railroad observation car President Harding used in 1923, and a narrow gauge park train circling the grounds. Fairbanks itself, born of a 1901 trading post and the gold rush that followed, is interior Alaska's largest city, about 196 road miles south of the Arctic Circle.
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