Hide Article Text (OCR)
A genuine *■monster trucknenoiIT WAS KNOWN AS “The Arctic Monster.” : ,John Reeves and Rick WintherThe mechanical innards have long since been stripped from the monster, which spent much of the past 30 years in Bobby Miller’s care, but it remains an impressive piece of engineering. It cost $450,000 in 1955, the equivalent of $2.5 million today.The trailers are 16-feet wide and the tires are bigger than passenger cars. The train was equipped with two 400-horsepower engines that powered electric motors on each wheel. Itwas supposed to have a range of 1,000 miles and it carried a 2,100-gallon fuel tank.It hauled 250 tons of supplies out of Circle on its first trip, according to an account writtenin 1969 by journalist MikeDalton, but it was plagued with problems from the start.After about two hours of operation, the DC generator began acting up. Twelve hours after leaving the Yukon the first main shaft broke. It took 24 hours to change the drive shaft,” Dalton wrote.The six-car train was plagued with more broken drive shafts, numerous flat tires and a fire that damaged it when Alaska Freight Lines tried to get it back to Eagle in November 1955.The train was a commercial fiasco and put a severe financial drain on Alaska Freight Lines, which was later absorbed by another company. The train stayed in Canada until Bobby Miller bought it and took it to his Fairbanks junkyard in 1969.THE TRAIN WAS BUILT bythe LeTourneau Co. of Longview, Texas, an enterprise founded by one of the giants of the heavy equipment business, R.G. LeTourneau.LeTourneau quit school in the seventh grade and spent five years shoveling sand, coal, scrap iron and slag.“This led to a permanent dislike of shovels,” he wrote as an adult. His company built three-quarters of the heavy equipment used by the U.S. Army duringWorld War II.He also built several overland trains that were used on desert sand and arctic snow in the 1950s. They were not commercially successful and were made obsolete by the success of the Lockheed Hercules cargo plane.inithehave salvaged part of what’s left . ,of the monster and set it up S1alongside the Steese Highway at Reeves’ Pump Station No. 13, the Alyeska irritant Reeves built jnacross the road from the pipeline viewpoint near Fox. ou*maOrange with black stripes, the overland train looks a bit like agiant caterpillar on huge tires, with the words “Alaska Freight Lines” spread across the front of eC(the cab. It’s the monster truck to maend all monster trucks. onlt;repIt’s also an intriguing piece of ^Alaska transportation history because it was built in 1955 to haulDEW Line supplies from Circle to , the Canadian northwest. The €snow train was designed to go £or cross-country without benefit of enroads, traveling on winter paths cleared by bulldozers.owThe remnants of the longest of LeTourneau’s trains is also in Fairbanks. An overland snow train he built for the U.S. Army that is now in sections in the North Pole area is the longest vehicle ever built, according to the Guinness Book of Records. AnStaSteve MePeak, who held high- Rilt; wire world records and was Waknown to the editors of the Guin- troness book, acquired the Army no' overland train and assembled it outside of Fairbanks nearly two yy£ decades ago. MePeak, who livesOutside, is the son of RogerMePeak of North Pole.arc me maAccording to the Guinness atBook, the train was 572 feet long ha'and could carry 400 tons at 20 Crcmph. v■ getWhat’s left of the snow train is owned by Carl Pederson and the McPeaks. The huge engine is inPederson’s junkyard on Badger Road near the Richardson ;JTHighway. Pederson said he has plans to do something next summer with the engine of the longest vehicle ever built. nuDermot P.oIb is a News-Mmer col- acireainsm
Newspaper Details
Fairbanks Daily News Miner
Fairbanks, Alaska, US
Sat, Oct 18, 1997
Page 11
Full Page
Clipped by
Mark M.
WA, USA 18 Aug 2020
Other Publications Near Fairbanks, Alaska
Fairbanks Daily News Miner
Daily News Miner
Fairbanks Weekly News Miner
Fairbanks Evening News
Fairbanks Daily Times
