Ice closes portion of Valley railroad

TALKEETNA — As crews work to fix damage from the Susitna River, the Alaska Railroad shut down its operations between Hurricane and Talkeetna on Sunday.

According to a press release, the railroad said passengers on its Sunday train unloaded in Hurricane and continued by bus to Talkeetna and Anchorage. Freight service is closed until the tracks are fixed.

“We’re starting to make some repairs but we’re also in kind of a wait-and-see mode because of the river,” said railroad spokesman Tim Thompson. “It’s still pushing ice into the track.”

He hesitated to give an estimate of how long service will be suspended.

“I’m thinking 24 to 48 hours,” he said, adding as a caveat that, “I just don’t know what the river’s going to do.”

The area of the track in question, which is between railroad mileposts 238 and 254, about 15 miles north of Talkeetna, is prone to this type of problem, Thompson said, depending on what happens during breakup. In seasons like the one we’re in, when breakup moves fast, the tracks tend to see ill effects.

“The last time this happened was about four or five years ago,” Thompson said. “It really depends on breakup. We’ve had a number of days now where it’s been really sunny.”

He said that right now crews are in the area. They came into Talkeetna and started working their way north.

“Some of it is just ice on the track some of it is the track has been misaligned,” Thompson said.

He said ice is building up into dams on the river and then letting loose and flying onto the tracks.

“We had a discharge last night,” he said Monday. “We had another one this morning.”

It seems like with each new assessment crews conduct, they come up with a new problem that needs to be fixed.

“Each time we’re coming into locations where there’s been more damage,” Thompson said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.