Centennial Park and WP&YR Railroad Exhibit

Centennial Park offers the opportunity to get up close and personal with two of the White Pass railroad's most unique artifacts, The Rotary Snowplow, and Engine "52" this first to ever makes its way down the freshly laid rails here in Skagway.

The White Pass and Yukon Route - Gateway to the Klondike

After the discovery of gold 700 miles to the North the great Klondike Gold Rush began. This migration of over 100,000 men and woman to the newly discovered gold fields of Bonanza Creek turned the small homestead of "Mooresville" into the boomtown of "Skagway" The influx of people became impossible for Moore to manage and the new stampeders essentially took over the town and changed the name to Skagway, which in the Tlingit language means "rough and windy place"

As the population increased and the White Pass and Chilkoot trails were overrun by prospecters, the immediate need for a railway came into focus. Miners and all of their supplies needed to be moved and moved quickly.

In 1897, three separate companies were organized to build a rail link from Skagway to Fort Selkirk, Yukon, 325 miles (523 km) away. Largely financed by British investors organized by Close Brothers merchant bank, a railroad was soon under construction. A 3 ft (914 mm) gauge was chosen by the railway contract builder Michael Heney. The narrow roadbed required by narrow gauge greatly reduced costs when the roadbed was blasted in solid rock. Even so, 450 tons of explosives were used to reach White Pass summit. The narrow gauge also permitted tighter radii to be used on curves, making the task easier by allowing the railroad to follow the landscape more, rather than having to be blasted through it.

Construction started in May 1898, but they encountered obstacles in dealing with the Skagway city government and the town's crime boss, Soapy Smith. The company president, Samuel H. Graves (1852–1911), was elected as chairman of the vigilante organization that was trying to expel Soapy and his gang of confidence men and rogues. On the evening of July 8, 1898, Soapy Smith was killed in the Shootout on the Juneau Wharf with guards at one of the vigilante's meetings. Samuel Graves witnessed the shooting. The railroad helped block off the escape routes of the gang, aiding in their capture, and the remaining difficulties in Skagway subsided.

On July 21, 1898, an excursion train hauled passengers for 4 miles (6.4 km) out of Skagway, the first train to operate in Alaska. On July 30, 1898, the charter rights and concessions of the three companies were acquired by the White Pass & Yukon Railway Company Limited, a new company organized in London. Construction reached the 2,885-foot (879.3 m) summit of White Pass, 20 miles (32 km) away from Skagway, by mid-February 1899. The railway reached Bennett, BC on July 6, 1899. In the summer of 1899, construction started north from Carcross to Whitehorse, 110 miles (177 km) north of Skagway. The construction crews working from Bennett along a difficult lakeshore reached Carcross the next year, and the last spike was driven on July 29, 1900, with service starting on August 1, 1900. By then much of the Gold Rush fever had died down.