Western Railroad Discussion > Seattle to Alaska ferry dock

I thought this was the dock where the barges to Alaska were loaded but after seeing it, I don't think so. I realize now the Seattle to Alaska dock is at the far north end of Harbor Island. Birdseye photos on Bing even show it being loaded by a UP GP using several MoPac cabooses as idlers. Is that area open to the public without going through gates etc?

Here are a few photos from the area.
Was this the Milwaukee's dock?
End of the line if you don't have your water wings.
Trying to make the bridge more interesting.

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I think what you are looking at is the old NP/BN/BNSf loading dock. BNSF now gives all of there Alaska traffic to the UP for loading at Harbor Island. The third pic is definitly the BNSF west Seattle draw bridge.
Kevin

this is indeed the former NP/BN/BNSF barge slip for Alaska and British Columbia's north coast. Several papermills were/are? located on the coastline of BC which were accessed directly by barge out of Seattle.

My understanding is that these guys are out of the Harbor Island location:
http://www.aml.lynden.com/ very impressive loading. There is a photo gallery in there and some webcam links as well. Pretty amazing stuff in the winter.

It takes a while to dig out info on the rail barges along the Canadian coastal waters. There seems ot be a few paper mills out there, I don't know of many published sources. Everything so far has been in Yahoo groups or Google searches. Sometimes just digging through Google Satellite images works,

Pacific_Division Wrote:
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> BNSF now gives all of
> there Alaska traffic to the UP for loading at
> Harbor Island.

(1) About how many Alaska-bound carloads per week from BNSF & UP leave Seattle by barge?
(2) Where did I get the idea that there is a CP/CN-to-UP Vancouver-to-Seattle barge to bypass the BNSF? Any truth to that?

At one time there had been a Milwaukee-BCR connection, that morphed into UP-BCR, but there appears to have been other smaller barge traffic that confuses the routes. Checking out the Canadian side of the routes also helps.
Here's another car barge mini-web-site as I consume more coffee:
http://www.mrcd.org/puget_sound_barges.html

When I lived in the Seattle area Seaspan was always busy, here's their photo gallery:
http://www.seaspan.com/photos.htm

Sometimes the Yahoo Groups for BCR and paper mills have interesting info, there's a huge number of Yahoo Groups with all sorts in interesting info.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/25/10 09:43 by TCnR.

The Milw barge slip used to be near T25 or 29 off of Alaskan Wy and on the south end of the Watcom hard, one could see where the tracks used to cross the road to get to the barge slip.

UP barge slip is on a public road, Paul.

Thank for the replies, I liked the photo of the tug races on AML-Lynden's page. I wonder if they still do that. It is sort of like tractor racing. I remembered, Mark, you'd posted photos of the loading process previously but didn't know if you were there on "official" business or not. I'm impressed how much things have changed in the 10 years I've been visiting and living in Seattle. With the viaduct replacement the changes will surely continue.