The Ghost Train to Nowhere

For railroad oldtimers around these wooded parts, it’s known as the Island Mountain ghost train--three boxcars and eight flatbeds still laden with their abandoned cargo, languishing nearly forgotten along a remote stretch of California’s most isolated rail line.

Fifteen months after they were stranded in a winter storm that washed out track on both sides of them, the 11 cars still sit forlornly in the heart of the forest, their cargo of prime redwood lumber exposed to the elements.

Even now, the cash-strapped Northwestern Pacific railroad has yet to find the money to fix the track and retrieve its train. And nobody knows when it will.

“We figured we’d get that lumber back in a week tops,” said former train master Clyde Ferguson. “Nobody ever thought it would stay there this long.”

The plight of the train is in many respects the story of the Northwestern Pacific itself--a luckless tale of foul weather, limited government funding and a prevailing gloom that what can go wrong eventually will.

It’s a tale about the cost of doing business along California’s soggy North Coast, which last year received more rain than Seattle. Come winter, the hard rains often wash out the railroad and stretches of U.S. 101--the region’s only major roadway.

The formidable winter downpours have discouraged manufacturers, who need reliable routes to bring their products to market across California and the nation. As a result, the region’s anemic economy--long reliant on the declining timber and fishing industries--remains derailed by a 9% unemployment rate, which is among the state’s highest and more than double the national average.

Recent years have treated the Northwestern Pacific no better.

The historic railroad, which for decades hauled sturdy North Coast redwood to help build homes across the United States, last year became the first rail line in U.S. history to be shut down by the federal government for chronic safety violations. It is more than $12 million in debt and unable to pay its bills.

For two years, a federal audit has held up $14 million in government funding that the railroad desperately needs to pay those debts and repair track damage.

And in December, barely a month after its closure, the publicly owned line was sued by California for allegedly polluting the scenic Eel River, a habitat for the endangered coho salmon.

Despite such enormous obstacles, a cadre of local activists--convinced that a working railroad is a big part of reviving the local economy--continues to battle government officials who view the line as a drain on taxpayers.

“What the Northwestern Pacific has already endured would make for a darned good made-for-television soap opera,” said Assemblywoman Virginia Strom-Martin (D-Duncans Mills). “The line is like an abused child. It has suffered a lot of pain, and it hasn’t gotten a whole lot of help from the government people who should be helping it.”

Little of that was apparent on the rainy Tuesday in February, 1998, when train engineer Nick Mitchell and conductor Gary Kittleson chugged out of the South Fork station in a miserable storm.

Hauling more than $500,000 worth of high-grade redwood, they were headed for a rendezvous with a northbound train at the Island Mountain station, an unpopulated outpost amid a stretch of track so secluded that it winds about 70 miles without a road crossing.

Just before 5 p.m., as a horizontal rain beat against the windshields of the two locomotives pushing the load, the men heard the first distress call from train master Ferguson. He radioed Mitchell that the foul weather had turned their sister train back south.

Worse, a critical situation loomed straight ahead: Just a quarter-mile down the line, the incessant rains had created a condition local conductors know as “swinging track.” With the ground washed out from beneath them, the rails dangled in midair like a windblown suspension bridge.

“I told them to get those locomotives out of there, to drop their load and come on home,” said Ferguson, a third-generation railroad man with a ruddy face and cowcatcher beard.

Even after ditching their heavy load, the men escaped with little time to spare. A few hours later, the rains washed out more than 300 feet of track just north of them, stranding the cargo on an island less than a mile long. Even today, it’s still impossible to reach the marooned cars without a 45-mile hike one-way through uninviting terrain.

A Troubled Line

Such hard luck is common freight along the Northwestern Pacific, the railroad that, like the region, is vulnerable to the whimsical hand of man and nature alike.

The 316-mile line has been troubled since its completion in 1914, when it became the first reliable overland route between the Bay Area and the far-flung North Coast.

Today, with its weather-caused washouts, rail historians say, the line’s northern end remains the most expensive stretch of track to maintain in North America.

North Coast residents say that it’s worth every penny.

Along with U.S. 101, the railroad is one of two economic lifelines to penetrate the infamous “Redwood Curtain,” the ancient wall of forest that isolates the region even today.

Connecting Arcata in Humboldt County with Schelleville in Napa County, the rail line cuts a dramatic path through the heart of the state’s northernmost reaches, meandering through vineyards, rolling grasslands and redwood forests, along the banks of the serpentine Russian and Eel rivers.

The line is California’s only publicly run all-purpose railroad, overseen by a seven-member board of volunteers that includes an ex-schoolteacher, a winemaker and a few retirees with no prior experience running a rail line.

In 1992, the board bought the line’s northernmost 180 miles from Southern Pacific Railroad with $6.1 million in public funds. A consortium of public agencies bought the southern segment in 1996 for $29 million.

But it is in the northern end, closed by storm damage in February 1998, where the battle over the railroad is being waged.

Board members admit that they had no idea what they were getting into when they took over a line left to languish in disrepair. With no tax dollars to pay the bills, the railroad has since struggled on the brink of financial calamity.

The railroad hasn’t provided regular passenger service since 1971, and in recent years has barely survived on occasional tourist excursions and freight hauling for a declining lumber industry.

State officials say it has outlived its usefulness. A 1995 Caltrans study concluded that the Northwestern Pacific “is not a critical component of either the transportation system or the economy of the area. It is a very small component, the loss of which would not be devastating.”

Furthermore, years of neglected track maintenance have turned the line into a serious financial risk, say government officials who question continued funding of what they believe is the public version of a hopeless fixer-upper.

Since 1992, the state and federal governments have pumped $60 million into the line in the form of federal disaster money and other grants and loans. They finally balked at the latest $14 million in payments, questioning the wisdom of the rail line’s continued taxpayer funding.

“What we’re asking is how long we can afford to put money into this railroad,” said spokeswoman Eliza Chan of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. “We want to give them money for the last time, not continually provide Band-Aids for wounds that open up year after year.”

A federal audit of the line’s accounting procedures concluded that the railroad must repay FEMA $2.5 million it cannot account for. Officials say that they found no wrongdoing, just amateurish bookkeeping.

Until those methods are improved, FEMA officials say, they will withhold $10 million in federal disaster funds. An additional $4.2 million in federal money administered by the California Transportation Commission is also being withheld.

The closure has hurt people like Frank Lovio, who for 33 years worked the railroad alongside his two uncles and four brothers.

Now all seven men are searching for work. Frank works for the line part-time and has reluctantly returned to school to learn a new trade.

“The worst part came when we had to look at each other and admit that we’d done everything we could,” he said. “We fought the elements for years to keep that railroad going. But we couldn’t beat the bureaucracy.”

And there’s Dave Schneider, who watches the epic railroad struggle and shakes his head. Last year, he built a pier on Humboldt Bay, along with a $100,000 rail spur, hoping to begin importing products from the Far East.

But a few weeks after the project was finished, the Northwestern Pacific closed down, leaving Schneider to fend off creditors and worry about the future.

“The loss of that railroad left more than a hole in this community’s heart,” he said. “It left a hole in our pocketbooks as well.”

Changing Economy

For so many years, as went “Big Timber” and “King Salmon,” so went the North Coast economy.

After World War II, a booming lumber industry provided one of every two jobs in a region where the per-capita income exceeded the national average. In 1959, the area’s 300 lumber mills transported 1.6 billion board-feet of wood on the line now known as the Northwestern Pacific.

In the 1950s, the bustling North Coast fishing fleet provided half of the state’s commercial salmon catch.

But environmental regulations, forest clear-cutting and overfishing brought painful changes. By the 1960s, lumber manufacturing provided just one-third of the region’s jobs; by 1997, it was just 7.8%.

By the early 1980s, the few remaining mills produced less than a quarter of the lumber they did in 1959. Meanwhile, North Coast unemployment levels soared to more than 17%.

Fishing also suffered. The region’s commercial catch--which in 1988 reached a peak of 100 million pounds, netting $67 million for the local economy--has since dropped to half that level. Last year, the commercial catch was valued at $35 million.

Nowadays, the North Coast provides less than 5% of the state’s commercial salmon catch.

The region has sought other means to support itself, shifting to a tourism and a service economy--with retail, hotel and restaurant jobs that pay far less.

“The death knell was that we couldn’t sustain the level of harvest of trees and fish,” said Steve Hackett, an economics professor at Humboldt State University. “We had to start looking for a new engine to drive the economy. We’re still looking.”

Service and government jobs now provide about half the North Coast employment, statistics show, with retail representing another quarter.

Frequent storm-related disruptions along U.S. 101 have scared away manufacturers. Phyllis Lammers, a local economic forecaster, said: “We don’t have the Hewlett-Packards, the companies that can provide a good way of life. They don’t seem to want to brave the conditions up here.”

Railroad backers say that a healthy Northwestern Pacific could change that. The line, they contend, is part of a plan to revitalize Humboldt Bay, the region’s seaport, that could bring thousands of new jobs to the North Coast.

The port will soon begin a $16-million project to deepen its shipping channel, an effort to transform the harbor from a backwater lumber port to a major distribution center for bulk cargo and Pacific Rim trade.

But the harbor can only compete if it has a healthy rail link to domestic markets, port operators say. Studies suggest that by 2015, a harbor-rail partnership could produce $221 million in annual port business, compared with $40 million for this year, said Dave Hull, head of the Humboldt Bay Port Authority.

“That means 3,000 jobs and $90 million [in wages] pumped into a desperate local economy,” he said. “We’re not talking small potatoes here.”

Effect on Eel River

The railroad now known as the Northwestern Pacific was cursed at infancy, even as the first steam locomotive huffed down its tracks.

On Oct. 23, 1914, the line’s first day, as officials from the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe railroads drove the golden spike that signified the completion of their jointly owned Eel River line, trouble struck. A slide buried the tracks south of Eureka, delaying for days the train carrying San Francisco dignitaries to the ceremony.

“Since Day 1, the Eel River has been very uneasy about having a rail line shoved down its throat--and it has dreamed up every means possible to extricate itself from those iron rails,” said local historian Raymond W. Hillman. “From the beginning, the railroad has made this river very angry.”

Still, the line was profitable for decades, Hillman said, until the government began putting huge swaths of North Coast timber off limits to logging and trucks became a more cost-effective way of transporting lumber. Cheaper Canadian lumber also cut into profits.

But for many of those profitable years, investigators say, the Northwestern Pacific railroad polluted the fragile Eel River by dumping such things as waste oil and spent locomotive batteries, and pushing soil into the water as its bulldozers rerouting the river.

“This case ranks very high on our list,” said Frank Simpson, a spokesman for the state Department of Toxic Substances Control. “The pollution that went on out there is very troubling.”

Rail officials say that most of the environmental damage to the Eel River took place under previous owners. One called the suit a “pie in the sky effort to kill this railroad, the last gasp of the Wilson administration.”

And they say they don’t have the money to clean up the mess.

The rail line’s funding woes have led to other safety concerns.

In November, the federal government ordered the railroad to cease operations because of unsafe conditions, including dozens of broken signals. The line had also ignored repairs to track, bridges and drainage structures.

Many of the broken flashers and bells were located at busy crossings, including two that served 22,000 and 16,000 vehicles daily. Much of the railroad’s track failed to meet even the lowest federal standard of track viability.

As the feud continues, said railroad worker Lovio, the North Coast waits anxiously, eager to know one thing: Will the trains ever run again?

One recent day, rail workers ran a locomotive along the tracks to make repairs just outside Eureka. “The whistle blew as we left town,” he said. “We must have gotten 25 or 30 calls from people wanting to know ‘Is the railroad open again?’

“And I told them, ‘Soon. Not yet, but soon.’ ”

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Troubled Train

Plagued by annual winter washouts and shaky government funding, the Northwestern Pacific Railroad is fighting for its survival. The publicly owned line, closed since November, has been championed by volunteers who are battling state and federal efforts to shut it down permanently.