Anton Anderson: inside North America's longest road tunnel

There are all kinds of tunnels around the world. One of the most unusual in the United States is in southeastern Alaska, under Maynard Mountain.

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The story of this tunnel began a few months before the United States entered World War II, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. In April of that year, the U.S. Army began construction of a railway tunnel under Mount Maynard to improve communications between Alaska and the rest of the country. The aforementioned Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the Japanese invasion of the Aleutian Islands in southwest Alaska in June 1942 led the Army to accelerate the tunnel's construction to improve the delivery of supplies to Alaska.

Despite numerous difficulties, the project was completed on April 23, 1943, under the direction of civil engineer Anton Albert Andrew Anderson (1892–1960) of the Alaska Railroad. The tunnel connected Whittier with Portage, and for many years it was known as the Whittier Tunnel, until it was renamed the Anton Anderson Memorial Tunnel in 1976, in honor of the engineer who directed the work, who had died 16 years earlier.

The tunnel was 4.1 kilometers long and had a single railway track. In the 1960s, the growth of the city of Whittier led to the establishment of a flatcar service to transport cars through the tunnel. In 1998, work began to convert this tunnel into a dual-use infrastructure, so that it could be used by both trains and cars and trucks. The old tracks, sleepers, and ballast were removed, and new rails were laid embedded in a concrete running surface, built on a layer of crushed rock to cushion the passage of trains.

The new tunnel design was inaugurated on June 7, 2000. The new design includes a 3.2 km long metal mesh to prevent rockfalls. Eight vehicle rest areas were built for breakdowns to prevent such incidents from blocking traffic inside the tunnel. Stopping a vehicle in one of these areas triggers an alarm at the tunnel's control center and can cause traffic delays.

Currently, the toll tunnel remains active as both a railway and a road crossing. According to its official website, from May 1st to September 30th, the tunnel is open from 5:30 a.m. to 11:13 p.m. The tunnel remains single-lane, so its direction changes every 15 minutes, allowing passage between Whittier and Bear Valley and vice versa at those intervals, except when a train needs to pass. From October 1st to April 30th, the opening hours are reduced to 7:00 a.m. to 10:45 p.m. Below you can see a video published by Vihan Family Voyage touring this tunnel:

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Main photo: Paxson Woelber.