We’ve previously seen booklets promoting the Alaska Railroad from 1934 and 1939. This one is from 1927, which was just four years after the line between Anchorage and Fairbanks was completed in 1923.
Click image to download an 17.5-MB PDF of this 20-page booklet.
In addition to promoting the Anchorage-Fairbanks route (and Mount McKinley, which is on the way) and the Seward-Anchorage route, this booklet describes a Yukon River cruise and the “Golden Belt” tour via Alaska Railroad to Fairbanks, an auto tour south to Kennecott, and the Copper River & Northwestern Railway to Cordova. The latter railroad had been built by the same engineer, Michael Heney, who had previously built the White Pass & Yukon Route.
Inside, a schedule shows that the railroad offered a daily train from Seward to Anchorage. Three days a week, the train went on from Anchorage to Fairbanks. In those days, Anchorage to Fairbanks took about 15 hours (compared with 12 hours today). Since the train started in Seward, the train halted passengers spent the night in a hotel the railroad built in Curry, which is now a ghost town.
The fare from Seward to Fairbanks was about $28, which is more than $490 in today’s money, plus a night in Curry, which started at $3 or about $50 today. Today the summer fare is about $388, plus a night in Anchorage with hotels near the train station starting at around $170.
The painting on the front cover shows a northbound passenger train passing Mount McKinley, with a caribou running from the train. The portrait appears to have been made at sunrise, which is an expression of artistic license as the train left Curry at 7:45 am, which was well after sunrise in the summer months.
The illustration is signed Willard R. Cox. Willard Roswell Cox (1902-1974) was born in Wichita, Kansas but made his way to the San Francisco Bay Area where he settled in Tiburon, across the Golden Gate from the city in Marin County. He shared a studio with fellow watercolorist Maurice Logan and worked for Standard Oil, Pacific Steamships, and Southern Pacific, including this 1940 poster of Carlsbad Caverns. In 1933, he joined the Puget Sound group of Northwest Painters, partly because of his work in Alaska.
