Passenger trains on the NWP
I hang my head when I read on Eric’s blog, that some asked if there ever were passenger trains from Humboldt County to the Bay Area. Three passenger trains per day, and ten passenger trains in the southern end, all round trip, if I’m reading an old time table correctly in one the NWP books. Later years they dwindled down, eventually to be run by a single, self-powered Budd car.
This image was done by John West, Eel Rock, April 1969, of the Budd Car. Title: The NWP (SP) Budd car heads south from Eureka to Willits on its tri-weekly roundtrip through the scenic Eel River canyon.
If you want to find out more, you need to read the NWP books, plus there is a Historical Society.
For a look at passenger trains on the South End with pictures.
Willits MCRS meeting will explore local rail option
A proposal to initiate light rail service in Mendocino County will be discussed at 11:30 a.m. Sunday[Today] in the Little Lake Grange hall on School Street.
As envisioned by the Mendocino County Railway Society, the meeting could spark “a rail revival in Northern California that could ultimately lead to connection with the Bay Area by means of the Sonoma Marin Area Rail Transit (SMART) project,” says the MCRS’ Laird Smith
“Peak oil has caused Willits to rapidly try to convert to a localized economy spurred on by the Willits Economic LocaLization movement,” says the MCRS’ Richard Jergenson. And sustainability “has to include an inexpensive local transportation system that would rely little, or not at all, on oil or coal.
Low-cost equipment exists to make a local rail system a reality, Jergenson claims, “most notably the Siemens Regio Sprinter, which ran on the North Western Pacific Railroad tracks in 1996 and is in service worldwide, and a solar-electric vehicle named the Soltrain which ran from Fort Bragg to Willits and back again, and then down to Ukiah” in the early 1990s.
“This need is a reality because trucks are going to be more and more limited in their ability to supply the town’s commodity needs as a result of the already steadily increasing oil/gas prices,” Smith asserts.
Novato freight house destroyed, photos included
The freight house at the Novato train depot finally fell Wednesday, Sept. 26, demolished by workers roughly two decades after most of the burned building was reduced to a skeletal frame. Signature properties, working on the Whole Foods/Condominuim project, agreed to destroy the building for the Sonoma Marin Area Rapid Transit, the owners. The Train depot’s passenger house, which was not severely burned, remains, and may be renovated as part of a prospective development near the Whole Foods project, according to Bob Lalanne of the Lalanne Group.
