I’m a huge fan of taking ferries and a huge fan of riding on trains, so imagine how smacked between the eyes I was today when I came across a reference to one of CN Rail’s former loyal servants by the name of the Aquatrain.
The Aquatrain was a sea-going barge that moved railway cars between Prince Rupert (halfway up the coast of BC) and Whittier, Alaska (named in 1915 for the nearby glacier of the same name—which itself had been named after the American poet John Greenleaf Whittier, although I didn’t quite get that connection).
Prior to having any sort of rail service whatsoever in Alaska, all cargo that arrived at the docks by boat would have to be trucked overland to destinations within the state. This was expensive and also time consuming. There were barges and ships that arrived in Whittier from San Francisco and Seattle, but that water route was made more complex to navigate because of the number of small islands along that stretch.
Alaska built itself a railway in the early half of the 1900s and that line would eventually move both cargo and passengers between the town of Seward, on the south coast, north to Fairbanks, which was a distance of about 470 miles. However, the port through which cargo would arrive in the state was at Whittier, 83 miles away from Seward, so in time a branch line needed to be laid to cover that distance.
Meanwhile in Canada, CN Rail (formerly known in the West as the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway—GTPR) had connected Prince Rupert, BC to Winnipeg, Manitoba (which was a rail hub) in 1914 and there were additional lines running south from Prince Rupert to Vancouver that could connect with lines going further south. The idea of running cargo to Alaska through Prince Rupert just made sense.
Although not a new idea (roll on/roll off train ferries had been used in other parts of the world since 1850), it wasn’t until 1963 that a ferry on that route was able to accommodate actual railcars with their cargo loads coming into Prince Rupert destined for Whittier and the rest of Alaska. By 1982 CNR had a newly engineered Aquatrain that was brought in to expand the rail freight service on this route. This was no average barge because its passengers were always and only cargo rail cars. Specially built by a company in South Korea who exclusively made train barges, the Aquatrain was constructed to be the largest train ferry in the world. It stretched 400 feet by 100 feet and was able to load complete train cars while leaving their shipments intact and eliminating the nuisance, expense, and time loss of having to offload the cargo from one method of transportation onto another. The new ferry had 8 side-by-side sidings onto which up to 45 train cars per trip were able to be loaded, by being pushed on by an engine at the port. The Aquatrain itself was unmanned and unpowered and therefore needed to be towed and pushed by tug/towboats to get it from port to port.
Once the barge docked at Whittier, its passengers would be joined to the engine of the Alaskan train that awaited them in port, and each row of cars could be pulled cleanly off the barge and set on their way to their final destinations, having only needed one bill of lading to cover the entire trip.
The route up the coast to Whittier from Prince Rupert took between 3 and 5 days. The course, which ran along the Inside Passage, could knock as much as 600 miles off any other water journey from the closest major American city along the Pacific Coast.
CN operated this ingenious train barge until 1993 when it was sold to the tugboat company responsible for steering the enormous barge. Foss Maritime continued to use it in their fleet until finally retiring the barge, and apparently the route entirely, in 2021.
The port at Prince Rupert remains a vital connection to goods shipped by water to and from Canada—in fact, it is our third largest port! CN Rail is still Canada’s largest freight railway in terms of revenue and the size of the network it owns. The company who constructed this amazing rail cargo ferry seems to have slipped into receivership a decade ago, taking their expertise in building quality rail-marine barges with them and leaving the Aquatrain holding the title of being the largest vessel of its type ever built. Whittier, Alaska remains a stop on some of the cruise ships’ schedules, although Juneau has taken over the role of being the state’s major cargo port.
But while the ports it connected, the rail lines that it supported, and the cargo that it carried, all seem to have been able to continue on without it, doesn’t it feel like a certain twinkle or charm has been extinguished along with the retiring of this mythical beast called The Aquatrain? As with those weird little vehicles scurrying here and there on the tarmac as we watch from the big windows of the airport, we seem to have a fascination and an appreciation for purpose-built vehicles whose necessity and uses we could have never even imagined.
The Aquatrain, a ferry that was designed to move trains, is part of that category and proves, still again, that there are sparks of creativity that ignite all of areas of life, if we just pay close enough attention.
