In 1994 I flew from Ontario, CA (ONT) to Atlanta, GA (ATL) on Delta Air Lines. The flight was oversold and they were looking for volunteers to take a later flight. The incentive to get people to volunteer was a free ticket good for one year on Delta to anywhere in the U.S.A. except Hawaii. So I volunteered and figured this would be a good way to visit Alaska for the first time for a cheap price (free). Airfares to Alaska were pretty expensive at the time. So in June, so as not too take too much time off from conductoring at Metrolink, I made another "whirlwind tour", flying to Anchorage (ANC), where I rented a car and drove to Portage to ride the shuttle train to Whittier. This was before the tunnels were paved for combined rail and auto traffic. The next day I rode from Anchorage to Seward and return. The day after that I rode the train to Fairbanks, spent the night there and flew home the next day, with the plane making an intermediate stop in Juneau (JNU, another "new" airport).

Here's a photo I took on June 23, 1994, TWENTY-NINE YEARS AGO. After I finished riding the shuttle train to Whittier, and with the flexibility of a rental car, I scouted out a scenic place along Turnagain Arm and took this photo of the Seward-Anchorage train making its way to Anchorage. It was weird experiencing the long days with daylight hours and I was also able to see the tide going out of Turnagain Arm, which has some of the largest tidal fluctuations of anywhere on the planet. It looks like a big wave that is staying stationary and some people have been known to surf it. My visit was shortly after the Alaska Railroad bought some passenger cars from the Korean builder Dawoo. I found them to be exceptionally nice and the large windows reminded me of the equipment that was used on Espee's Shasta Daylight.