Curious Alaska: What’s the story with Anchorage’s barely-used airport train station?

Cruise ship passengers from Seward arrive at the Bill Sheffield Alaska Railroad Depot at Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport on June 23. (Bill Roth / ADN) Curious Alaska is an ongoing feature powered by your questions. What do you want to know or want us to investigate about life in Alaska, stories behind the news or why things are the way they are? Let us know in the form at the bottom of the story.

Question: What’s the deal with the train station at the Anchorage airport? Does anyone use it? Alaska’s busiest airport has a railroad station attached to it, just a tunnel away from the terminal of Anchorage’s Ted Stevens International Airport. The Bill Sheffield Alaska Railroad Depot cost $28 million to build back in the early 2000s using federal money secured by the late U.S.

Sen. Ted Stevens, then at the pinnacle of his influence in Congress. At its grand opening at the end of 2002, Stevens called the facility “years ahead of its time.

” It may still be. Grand plans for use of the depot have never quite materialized. The facility itself is a state-of-the-art, 24,000-square-foot building linked to the airport by a tunnel with glimmering LED-light displays meant to evoke the aurora borealis.

The design won a prestigious architecture citation. Simulated northern lights greet travelers near the Bill Sheffield Alaska Railroad Depot at Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport on June 23. (Bill Roth / ADN) “Passengers and visitors arriving in Anchorage by air a.