You know what I just remembered? It’s nearly 2011! And do you know what that means? It means that the North Coast Railroad Authority is just a few short months away from relaunching railroad freight service to and from Humboldt County. Yes, the repairs must be nearly all in place. The tracks between here and the Bay Area, shuttered these last 13 years, are probably all polished and oiled, and we can expect those big locomotives to come chugging into town any day now, pulling cheery carloads of Christmas loot behind them.
Wait a minute. You say this is incorrect? You say that rail service to Humboldt County as dead as it has been for a decade, or even deader? You say that not even the NCRA itself can pretend it has any hope of restoring service to Humboldt County any time in the foreseeable future? You say that it hasn’t even managed to open any track at all yet, and its scattered and outdated mission statement, along with its bullheadedly clueless management, continues to make enemies at every turn?
Huh. Then I guess former Humboldt County Supervisor John Woolley must have been mistaken back in the summer of 2007, when he bravely stood by the authority’s blatantly fabricated official projections, and announced, to this newspaper and to the county, that train service to Humboldt County would be restored by the year 2011. And that therefore people who might want to build an intercity hiking/biking trail on the decaying public right-of-way should please get bent.
The whole sad tale was told in a Journal cover story at the time (see “The Squeeze”, July 5, 2007). In short, the story was this: That the North Coast Railroad Authority, a state agency that owns most of the track between here and Marin County, blindly pursues an impossible mandate. It has to move lots and lots of goods if it is to have any chance at all of operating at something approaching a balanced budget, yet it can only move a small amount of goods through the urban counties at the south end of the line if they are not to revolt. It has to pretend to have plans to reopen the Humboldt County portion of the line if local calls for rail-banking and trail construction are to be squelched, yet the near-bankrupt agency needs several hundreds of millions in investment to even take a stab at reopening the geologically sketchy section of the line that runs along the Eel River. In any case, there aren’t enough goods coming in or out of here in the post-timber era to make it worthwhile.
And yet the railroad authority refuses to die. The sheer bureaucratic inertia of the thing means that the NCRA may well plod along forever, its grand return always scheduled about four years in the future. Its curious organizational chart means that absolutely no one is responsible for its unbroken 20-year record of absolute failure. And maybe that’s what Tom MacDonald, one of the NCRA board’s renegade members from Marin, meant when he addressed the Marin County Board of Supervisors Tuesday.
“If we are going to create accountability, it flows to the public through you,” MacDonald beseeched the Marin Supes. “That’s why we’re asking for your help.”
MacDonald and his colleague, Marin County NCRA Director Bernie Meyers, were begging the Marin County board to hold hearings on the railroad authority’s relationship with NWP Co., the private company that in 2006 was awarded exclusive rights to run freight on the still-imaginary line. Meyers had just submitted an authoritative written report on this shaky deal. The NCRA, essentially, awarded NWP a hundred-year exclusive deal, for which the company — which counts former Congressman Doug Bosco among its investors — paid nothing. Bosco’s former Congressional chief of staff, Mitch Stogner, was and is the executive director of the NCRA.
Meyers and MacDonald are hoping to get the contract renegotiated and/or overturned. Why? Probably not only because it is obscene on its face. There is also that fact that NWP’s public fact, John Williams, has been taking to bullying Marin County and Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit, which wants to open commuter passenger service on the same lines. (SMART actually owns the deed to the rails on the very south end.) Williams has, in the past, made outrageous protests against SMART’s desire to place trails along its section of line, threatening legal action if such trail-building were to move forward. He’s also insisted on setting his own timetable for his still-imaginary freight service, claiming primacy over commuter trains.
So Marin County agreed to MacDonald and Meyers’ request to call NCRA onto the carpet at a future meeting. Maybe they’ll even succeed in ousting Williams and Bosco. Will it make any difference to us, here in Humboldt County? Not likely. I expect someone to say, soon, that there’ll be trains here by 2015.
This article appears in Top 10 Stories.
NWP bullying SMART? You got that backwards. SMART is the one playing dirty tricks and trying to screw NWP over. Can this article be any more biased?
Where is capdiamont to share his vision for the cho-cho train?
Stu: Who picked the fight, would you say?
I would say SMART. Now the NWP isn’t exactly 100% right either but compared to what SMART has done, NWP looks like the world’s most honest “company”. SMART is not a railroad or a transit agency, but a bunch of politicians out for themselves. The population of Marin and Sonoma is not enough to warrant a commuter line. I’m not anti-train, I’m a frequent Amtrak traveler myself. I’m against this waste of money called SMART. I believe freight can turn a profit, commuter, not so much. To each his own I guess.
You’d say SMART? Because I’d date the beef back to 2007, when NCRA was simultaneously: a). telling the CTC that it was planning to soon ship umpteen million container and gravel cars from Humboldt County, and b). telling SMART that it was planning to ship almost nothing at all.
If you remember rightly, that little disparity forced SMART to scrap its EIR and delay a ballot measure. Not the best way to make friends and influence people.
I’m talking about NWP, not NCRA. I don’t at all agree with NCRA and SMART constantly cattle prodding each other. In my mind, NCRA is just as bad and corrupt as SMART. It’s such a shame that rail infrastructure like this is sitting unused because everyone wants their piece of pie.
What’s a cho-cho train? Is it Korean?
NCRA and NWP would have a better chance of establishing a realistic business plan if they chuck the baggage of rail service to Eureka, and would ruffle less feathers on the south end as well.
One small rail infrastructure and two factions of boondogglers with pie-in-the-sky plans fighting over it. Sad.
Mr. Sims refers to the NCRA’s “.. unbroken 20-year record of absolute failure.” But within a few months we could see freight trains, due to years of struggle by dedicated staff and board members of the NCRA to plan repairs, obtain money and direct the repairs while under constant threat and reality of lawsuits to prevent the resumption of rail freight. This isn’t a failure. It is best described as the results of perseverance and persistence for a good cause.
He refers to bureaucratic inertia. The NCRA staff has 3 people. That cannot be bureaucratic. That is not inertia. Their results are due to persistence!
Mr. Sims says the NCRA “..blindly pursues an impossible mandate … to move lots … of goods … to have any chance … of operating at … a balanced budget.” And yet, the NWP, a private company, has contributed money to support the NCRA while they have restored the track to useful purpose. Apparently the NWP thinks they can get a return on their investment, instead of the impossibility Mr. Sims suggests. The NCRA hasn’t paid the NWP anything.
In 2006, what companies were willing to invest in this railroad restoration? With the political, legal and regulatory climate, the chances of a return on investment were poor. And yet, NWP did invest, and they continue to do so. Now, just a few months from when the NWP might see a return on investment, after 5 years, Mr. Myers and McDonald have proposed that this deal was better for the NWP than it was for California citizens.
I suggest that with the increase in jobs and economies that will result from the return of rail freight, the overall winners will be all the citizens served by this railroad, whether in business, employed by businesses or relieved of some truck traffic on the freeways.
Freight trains within a few months? Not to Humboldt County. I recommend that folks take a float down the Eel River from Dos Rios to Alderpoint and view the utterly devastated condition of the tracks. Even if funds were available to repair this section of track, it would take years just to get the permits in place to proceed with the work, let alone actually fix anything. Then all it will take is another big winter storm to re-trigger numerous landslides and shut the tracks down again, again and again.
There is a geographic disconnect above. The freight trains we may see in a few months will only be on the southern end of the NCRA line, south of Willits. There doesn’t seem to be enough money, commerce nor political will to repair the line through the Eel River canyon.
I’ve watched the videos of what the washout looks like and am pretty sure that it could be engineered.
How far has responsible forestry come? If given a satisfactory answer, I’d prefer trains over trucks.
Too much Rhetoric and stalling tactics to suit me. When in heavens name will people stop fighting and come to some agreeable solution. Railroad is rebuilt, ready for traffic, and ready to lend freight service to Sonoma County. Whether or not Humboldt county is a pipe dream, get going with the operation and put SMART to bed. In other words,…Get your Ass in Gear !!!
Humboldt rail service IS a pipe dream. Nothing big gets done in this state anymore without a mindfracking effort of hairsplitting sloth and vast displays of staggering denial. Witness that CalTrans has guaranteed that the nation’s 2nd busiest bridge will collapse in the next mere 7.0 quake, yet it takes 24 years to actually replace it?? The original took two!! Witness the Confusion Hill slide threat “one big storm away” from cutting Hwy 101 permanently, and yet under “emergency” red-tape cutting it still takes eight years to get the bypass bridges open.
We, unfortunately, live in mean times where lawyers rule and bureaucrats frolic in their vast array of fiefdoms. Little of consequence for the public good is done. Sweet utopian dreams keep clashing with the gray reality that the best we can hope for is some occasional decent road repair and maybe a renovated school every 20 years. Forget this stupid train. Bank the right of way. Hell, the regulations and lawsuits will probably cause THAT to take 20 years.
See you in Idaho, neighbors!