Features

WILLITS — California taxpayers are sinking $60 million into reopening a North Coast railroad that has repeatedly fallen victim to a quagmire environment, crippling costs and chronically poor maintenance and management. 

The 286-mile Northwestern Pacific Railroad runs from the Napa Valley to Arcata. For 83 years, it served a region so isolated it’s become known as California’s “Lost Coast” – until federal regulators shut it down three years ago as a threat to public safety. 

Even the railroad’s operators say the region’s unstable geography means the track routinely will be washed out by floods and earthslides, costing millions more in annual repairs. 

Yet Gov. Gray Davis decided to pour more tax money into the troubled railroad, shortly after shippers who would profit most contributed more than $60,000 to his campaign fund. 

“It’s a railroad that benefits the same handful of special interests that generally benefit from public largesse on the North Coast,” complained Kevin Bundy, policy director of the Garberville-based Environmental Protection Information Center. 

Pacific Lumber and Simpson Timber say they could indeed ship their timber more cheaply by rail than by truck over Highway 101. But they and other railroad supporters say better transportation will mean an improved economy in an area hard-hit by declines in the lumber and fishing industries. 

“The jobs that could be created all along the North Coast to me are incalculable,” said Robert Jehn, who chairs the North Coast Railroad Authority, a consortium of local governments that bought sections of the railroad with state help in 1992 and 1995. 

Heavy rainfall annually turns the soil the consistency of toothpaste, known locally as “blue goo.” The track bed turns to quicksand and canyon walls ooze downhill. 

With such unstable soil, a 1998 federal study found it would take $642 million – more than 10 times the state’s current investment – to upgrade the track to handle passengers and freight without restrictions imposed by the Federal Railroad Administration. 

“The railroad has been a black hole. This $60 million the government is going to throw at it, why don’t they just throw it out the window?” asked Patricia Clary of CATS, Californians for Alternatives to Toxins. “This $60 million won’t fix the railroad. They’ll reopen it, but it will close again.” 

Rail supporters say they can get the railroad operating with the state’s $60 million. They say it’s worth the price, though a 1995 California Department of Transportation study concluded the railroad “has y to shore up the railroad, “he was going to see the worst environmental disaster he’s seen in his life up in the Eel River Canyon. It’s all going to fall down into the river.” 

Railroad operators want to reopen in sections, as repair work is completed. 

Last week, the Federal Railroad Administration cleared the railroad to reopen 40 miles of track from Napa Junction to Petaluma, less than 15 percent of its overall length, along the least troublesome southern section. Railroad officials want to open another 20 miles to Windsor this spring and an additional 77 miles to Willits this summer, though they have repeatedly been frustrated by delays. 

Businesses, residents and government officials are counting on the railroad to eventually ease the North Coast’s stubborn isolation between coastal mountains and the Pacific Ocean. 

On the southern end, fast-growing Sonoma County wants to extend commuter service along the line from the Bay Area to Cloverdale. 

To the north, Mendocino and Humboldt counties hope better transportation will help replace jobs lost in the timber and fishing industries. 

The federal and local governments spent more than $17 million to deepen Humboldt Bay Harbor in hopes of turning Eureka into a major shipping port.  

But without the railroad, the only way to move material is over Highway 101, itself so twisted by the region’s geography that there are permanent restrictions on trucking. 

“We raise our families here, and they can’t stay here because they can’t find work, or they can’t find the kind of job that would pay them enough to stay here,” said Kaye Strickland, who heads Citizens for Port Development, a group she formed to back the railroad. 

The railroad’s perennial closures were presaged at that first opening in 1914, when the ceremonial trains couldn’t return to Eureka because of a landslide. 

Keeping the tracks open has been a battle ever since, said John Darling, whose firm signed a contract to operate the railroad two weeks before a series of 1998 winter storms closed it down. 

He’s convinced, however, that the railroad fell victim to an unusual series of floods, poor maintenance and antiquated equipment. In a year of average rainfall, Darling predicts the trains will have to shut down two weeks for track repairs. 

He projects profits from freight shippers and excursion passengers will pay the railroad’s operating costs as early as its second year of operation. But Darling, along with state and federal regulators, acknowledges it will likely take more tax dollars to repair periodic washouts, much as it does to keep Highway 101 open. 

“With the highway, when something goes out they pay millions to put it back, because that’s our lifeline. But the railroad should be our lifeline, too,” argued Eureka resident Strickland. 

“The whole northern part of California is on unstable ground. No matter where you put a highway or bridge or anything, it’s the same thing. The railroad deserves the same subsidy as all the others.”