It takes a train to raise a community: Skagway parlays history and scenery into financial security.

• Author: Lavrakas, Dimitra
• Position: TOURISM

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From the first, Skagway has been a tourist town. Historically a stop-over and fish camp for the Chilkoot Tlingits on their way over the Chilkoot Trail, a main trade route to their fellow Tlingits in Carcross, Canada, and beyond, Skagway became a town that boomed and busted like clockwork after the discovery of gold in the Yukon Territory's Klondike in 1886.

Tourists came to watch the 20,000 men and women tackle those infamous routes to wealth in their headlong rush to Dawson City--the Chilkoot Pass and the White Pass trails.

'THE SCENIC RAILWAY OF THE WORLD'

In 1898, the narrow-gauge White Pass & Yukon Route Railroad (WP&YR) was built from Skagway to Carcross, British Columbia, Canada, to provide another way to the Klondike. The stampede was pretty much over by then, but tourists rushed up the Inside Passage to ride the rails.

They still do.

In a profoundly significant way, the railroad cemented Skagway as a tourist destination from the very first. It remains the most popular land excursion in town, taking ticket holders from the Broadway, Ore and Railroad docks in Skagway over the heights of the White Pass, across breathtaking gorges, by way of tunnels drilled through bedrock, into British Columbia and on to Bennett, where once, frantic stampeders assembled boats for the treacherous Yukon River water route to the Klondike.

The railroad, now owned by TriWhite Corp. based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, was also visionary in its approach to transportation. It saw the movement of people and goods as intermodal and operated docks, trains, stage coaches, sleighs, buses, paddlewheelers, trucks, ships, airplanes, hotels and pipelines. It took visitors from the tidewater in Skagway into railcars and onto stemwheelers all the way to Atlin, British Columbia, a quaint gold-mining town on the shores of a stunningly blue Lake Atlin. But regretfully, it never did get that patent for containerization, which today remains the primary method of worldwide shipment of goods.

Like so many gold rush towns in Alaska, Skagway has experienced periods of prosperity and perilous economic periods. In 1982, WP&YR shut down because of low prices on the world market for the ore it transported from the Yukon. Six years of hard times landed on the town and an estimated 60 percent to 80 percent of the townspeople were unemployed. Reopening in 1988 as a seasonal tourist attraction, the railroad has seen a steady rise in ridership from 37,000 in its...