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By 1915 the railroad had eighteen locomotives, eight large passenger coaches and 256 freight cars. Whenever possible, it was soon operating six days a week between Cordova and Kennecott.
Abruptly and almost rudely, after a brief but event-filled and heady period of just forty years, from 1898 when the Valdez-Klutina Glacier trek occurred until 1938 when the last train pulled out, it was all over. Kennecott quickly but quietly shut down. The white inhabitants of the towns and hamlets along the railroad deserted the district en masse overnight. It happened so quickly that many of the homes were left completely intact, right down to the china on the tables and the linen on the beds--as if the occupants had simply walked off, intending to soon return. None of them ever came back. It was over.
But most believed that Kennecott’s rapid pull-out was just another temporary mine closure, like the one which had occurred during the Great Depression from 1932 until 1935. Yet while many believed that the large interior town of Kennecott and the mines on the ridge above were sleeping, in fact the life that was Kennecott had quietly slipped away like a man in the rear of a crowded room slipping unnoticed out the back door--death imitating sleep.

Only the Ahtna Indians who had lived in the area since the end of the last Ice Age, and a very few hardy settlers and miners remained behind. The company town of Kennecott, with its fourteen-story mill and enormous power plant and other enormous buildings, along with the completely dependent supply-town of McCarthy, plus all 196 miles of railroad line now sat empty and forlorn. All services ended. The delivery of all those things along the entire railroad line which kept modern civilization alive in the wilderness, from mail and telegrams to bunker fuel and coal, to dry goods and groceries, to player pianos and Victrolas abruptly ceased.
In short order, first the railroad rolling stock, then the steel rail, the power lines, the machinery and the buildings and their furnishings began to disappear. In time, the trestles began to collapse and the Copper River began washing out sections of the rail bed. The stretch of railroad south of Chitina and north of the old Million Dollar Bridge became inaccessible when the willows and alders took over the remaining railway line, strangling the rail bed under growth as thick as any tropical jungle. Remote buildings and other structures collapsed under the weight of successive winters of heavy snow until little remained of what had once been a magnificent railroad system.

Yet even as the railroad remnants, from the very small to the gigantic, gradually vanished, the echoes remained. All those people engaged in so much intense activity in those four decades had left their indelible imprint upon the land. All those frustrations, triumphs, failures, the outright catastrophes, the deaths, the births, the new-found friendships and the marriages--all those things which are common in any human community--were somehow concentrated and magnified along the rail line.

It is still possible to follow along the old railroad track bed in the places carrying the old names such as Uranatina or Chitina, Strelna or McCarthy, but especially at Kennecott, and pick up the faint sounds of laughter or crying or shouting or some other echo of people long gone. Sometimes it is the sound of the clanging of heavy metal tools. Occasionally the reverberations of the train working its way up the tracks, along with the hollow sound of a steam whistle echoing its way up the valley, can still be heard. That could only be the legendary ghost train, Chitina Local No. 71, maintaining its unearthly schedule along the uninhabited valley. From time to time a complete passenger train is rumored to have been spotted from the air, but none has never been found on the ground.