For most of his term, Gov. Mike Dunleavy has been claiming that the proposed railroad from Alberta to Alaska is the next big thing.

There was more suspension of disbelief than suspense about why anyone would risk billions to make this project a reality. Dunleavy believed the ballyhoo and added his own, claiming that investors were ready to put up $13 billion or $15 billion or $17 billion, the exact number of billions subject to change.

“The rail link between our state, Canada and the rest of the country has been a dream for many generations. This is a big win for Alaska and our entire country,” Dunleavy said last September, shortly after President Tump said he would approve a border crossing permit. The railroad would be a “game changer,” Dunleavy said.

The Alaska Congressional delegation boarded the Alberta express dream and had nothing but praise and high expectations. “I will continue to support A2A to its completion,” Rep. Don Young boasted.

Former Lt. Gov. Mead Treadwell, vice chairman of the railroad company, was the biggest and cheerleader in the state.

“I think Alaska is pretty lucky right now to have found an entrepreneur who has written checks, right now it’s passing $100 million to do this,” Treadwell said last September, referring to chairman and founder Sean McCoshen.

He said McCoshen was prepared to spend $125 million more on the Point MacKenzie rail spur “if we get the right gateways passed.”

Treadwell said McCoshen had hundreds of millions in family assets and suggested that the investor’s personal wealth was behind the project, giving it a solid foundation.

That turns out not to be the case. More and more, the A2A railroad dream looks like a Great Train Wreck.

McCoshen spent borrowed money on the railroad, funds supplied by Bridging Finance, a company now under receivership in Canada that was headed by David Sharpe, co-founder of the railroad project.

A forensic auditor this spring claimed that McCoshen’s net worth was a negative $96 million. McCoshen has borrowed hundreds of millions from Bridging Finance. Sharpe has denied that $19.6 million deposited in his account by McCoshen was a kickback.

McCoshen has been unable to answer questions because of “medical circumstances,” said PriceWaterhouseCoopers, which is now managing Bridging Finance and trying to get money back from McCoshen.

On Saturday,, the Toronto Globe and Mail published a detailed look at McCoshen, a Winnipeg businessman who is a central figure in the growing Bridging Finance fiasco. McCoshen hasn’t been heard from publicly in two months.

“Last week, Bridging’s receiver alleged that millions of dollars slated for Mr. McCoshen’s railway company were transferred into his personal bank account. Millions more appear to have gone to a numbered company he controlled. The receiver, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC), has been ‘unable to determine the commercial relationship’ between that company and A2A.”

In September 2019, Dunleavy said the billions needed for McCoshen’s railroad to Alaska were close at hand. Alberta would soon be shipping tar sands north by rail and exporting them from Anchorage or Valdez, he predicted.

The railroad would create “hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of jobs for Alaskans,” the governor said.

“You will be getting cheaper goods from Canada and the Lower 48 and they’re going to look to Alaska—north to the future—for their own futures because they’re having a hard time shipping this stuff out,” he said.

A year ago, Dunleavy said the headquarters of the Space Force should be in Alaska and the “impending construction of the Alaska to Alberta Railway” would improve life for Alaskans. With that statement, he won the Daily Double, piling one pipedream on top of another.

“With private funding already available, a signature from President Trump is all we need to set in motion a transformative project that will connect Alaska to the lower 48 by rail. The A2A Railway will give industries, including the Space Force, an additional option for moving heavy materials to and from Alaska,” Dunleavy beamed.

In recent weeks, the news that the railroad project was based on questionable loans has turned the venture into what sounds like a funeral train.

The names of those listed under “executive management” for the project have been removed from the website, including McCoshen, founder and chairman.

Officials of the railroad company told PriceWaterhouseCoopers in May that the company “was in need of funding due to an expected cash shortfall.”

The legal counsel for the railroad resigned and certain members of the railroad management have resigned as well, including J.P. Gladu, president of the company.

“The events over the past month concerning Bridging Finance Inc. have significantly compromised the vision of A2A Rail and put the project’s future in immediate peril,” Gladu wrote in a his resignation letter, obtained by The Globe and Mail. “The uncertainty emerging out of recent events have undermined the carefully constructed relationships I have worked hard to build with the Indigenous peoples and governments of the Canadian Northwest.”

PriceWaterhouseCoopers has demanded payment from the railroad and McCoshen “of all amounts outstanding” under the railroad loans. The single largest item in the Bridging Finance portfolio was the railroad project, a total of more than $300 million in Canadian dollars, including loans, convertible debt and equity.

Including interest and fees, the outstanding balance is $207.8 million in Canadian dollars, about $167 million in U.S. dollars.

The receiver is also trying to find out why there was a major effort by the financing company to delete 34,000 emails last year. “The apparent email deletion effort included searches for ‘McCoshen’ and a numbered company he controls that allegedly received over $80 million from various Bridging funds, PwC said,” Investment Executive reported.

A lawyer for Sharpe said the PwC report “impugned” the Alaska-Alberta railroad project and has created a risk of “significantly eroding the value” of the asset.

“Moreover, the A2A railway is a critically important infrastructure project to the Indigenous people and Canada more broadly, and, unless handled strategically, this receivership imperils its completion,” she said, according to the Financial Post. “Indeed, it’s clear that the importance of this project to Canada’s Indigenous people is not well understood by either the Ontario Securities Commission or the receiver.”

Meanwhile, the Alaska politicians who believed everything they heard about the financial strength of the proposed Alberta railroad have stopped talking about it as the next big thing.

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