At one point a hundred years ago Alaska had only 150 miles of railroad, nearly all of it narrow gage. Sherri McBride has compiled this illustrated 9 page brochure

An interesting tale I received via email from Dave, which seems to be corroborated more or less by Wikipedia's entry noted at the end:

If you were in the market for a watch in 1880, would you know where to get one? You would go to a store, right? Well, of course you could do that, but if you wanted one that was cheaper and a bit better than most of the store watches, you went to the train station! Sound a bit funny? Well, for about 500 towns across the northern United States, that's where the best watches were found.*