White Pass & Yukon Route No. 69

No. 69 is a narrow-gauge 2-8-0 “Consolidation” built by Baldwin Locomotive Works in June 1908 (serial no. 32962) for the White Pass & Yukon Route. At 134,000 lb it was, at the time, one of the heaviest narrow-gauge, outside-frame locomotives Baldwin had built, engineered to work grades as steep as 3.9 percent and curves as tight as 20 degrees on the line between Skagway and Whitehorse. Engineer J.D. True gave it the nickname “Bull of the Woods” for its pulling power.

No. 69 hauled both freight and passenger trains for WP&YR for roughly three decades and survived the February 1932 Skagway roundhouse fire that damaged four of the railway’s locomotives, returning to service after repairs by that August. During World War II it was pressed into U.S. Army Transportation Corps service supporting construction of the Alaska Highway, picking up the nickname “Gila Monster.”

Retired from WP&YR revenue service in 1954, No. 69 began a long second career on the mainland: the Black Hills Central Railroad in South Dakota acquired it in 1956 and used it to pull that tourist line’s first excursion train on August 18, 1957, under the nickname “Klondike Casey.” It later ran on the Nebraska Midland Railroad before passing to Nebraska’s Stuhr Museum. In 2001, the White Pass & Yukon Route reacquired its old engine through a trade, and after a restoration completed in 2006, No. 69 returned to excursion service at Skagway, occasionally doubleheading with sister locomotive No. 73.

No. 69 is currently out of service in Skagway undergoing its mandated 1,472-day FRA inspection and overhaul. Note: this entry substitutes WP&YR’s genuine second operating steam locomotive, No. 69, for the originally requested “steam engine No. 114” — WP&YR’s No. 114 is in fact a 1982 Bombardier DL-535E diesel-electric, not a steam locomotive, and it was sold to the Cumbres & Toltec Scenic Railroad in 2023–2024 and relocated to Colorado, so it is no longer part of the Skagway roster at all.