Railroad routes may come back

The rails are gone and the old rights of way are grown over with weeds and littered with debris. Livestock need no longer worry about “cowcatchers.”

But before the dominance of the internal combustion engine, rail traffic provided the Petaluma area with markets and transportation for more than half a century.

Petaluma once had a horsecar line and the Petaluma and Santa Rosa Railroad was a more picturesque, if not more efficient, predecessor of the local and regional bus transit systems.

Sonoma County’s first rail system, forerunner to the more recent Northwestern Pacific, wasn’t in existence until the mid-1870s, when the North Pacific Coast Railroad extended northward from Tomales to Monte Rio.

Prior to that, rails had been lain in Marin County, starting with the 3.48-mile San Rafael and San Quentin Railroad that linked those two settlements, the latter being a ferry port.

In 1871, the NPC was formed to stretch from Sausalito to Tomales Bay and then to Freestone, Occidental, Monte Rio and Duncans Mills.

The first railway in Petaluma was a short one, linking the city with the steamer dock at Haystack Landing (near where present-day Petaluma Boulevard South begins south of town).

Called the Petaluma and Haystack Railroad, it was the third rail line in the state.

At its Second-and-B-streets depot in August 1866, a locomotive explosion killed several people and severely injured John A. McNear, patriarch of Petaluma’s famous family. Afterwards, the railroad switched the mule power instead of steam.

The first intercity railway went into operation two years later when the North Pacific Railroad laid track from Petaluma north, starting a line through Santa Rosa to Cloverdale.

The line eventually ran to Eureka with a connection to the Southern Pacific at Ignacio and its terminus at the Tiburon ferry terminal.

Petaluma’s still-standing depot was built in 1914 and operated for decades, but sat in disrepair for many years before the city refurbished the buildings several years ago.

In the first decade of the 20th century, when the steam rail line running through Petaluma was still called the California Northwestern, another railroad was formed, this time using electricity as its power source.

The Petaluma and Santa Rosa Railroad drove its first spike April 5, 1904 at the steamer landing (Now called Steamer Landing Park, at the foot of Copeland Street) and eventually the track and trolley lines extended north to Sebastopol and Forestville, with spurs to Two Rock and Santa Rosa.

Carrying both passenger cars and farm products, the line served Sonoma County until passenger service ended in 1935, and the electric freight locomotives were pulled off in the 1940s as the line was torn up in some areas.

The old right-of-way is still visible in areas of Petaluma, most notably in the form of the Water Street trestle that supported part of the railroad’s west Petaluma spur that ran to the end of First Street, near Foundry Wharf.

In 2001, the former P&SR car barn at Weller and East D streets burned down in a suspected arson fire.

Now only the trestle and the former depot (the small yellow building next to the River House on Weller, which was moved from its original location at Washington and Copeland) remain as P&SR structures in town.

The most noteworthy event in the P&SR’s history was the battle of 1905, when the electric line tried to cross the CNW tracks on Sebastopol Avenue in Santa Rosa.

The CNW failed to stop the trolley line with an injunction and when a P&SR crew began to dig March 1, 1905, CNW locomotives with pipes fitted to expel steam and hot water on the workers moved back and forth across the track.

As P&SR workmen dug, CNW men filled in the holes. Fist fights broke out, a locomotive smashed a wagon full of sand, a P&SR director lay across the track to stop the steam engine from spraying his men, and finally Santa Rosa police arrested the CNW engineer.

The president of the CNW then arrived with 160 armed men and two Marin sheriff’s deputies, who he said would arrest the Santa Rosa police. The battle finally ended with a Superior Court injunction against the CNW, and the P&SR crossed the tracks into Santa Rosa.

Though railroads have been silent in Petaluma for almost a decade, plans are afoot to bring back trains on both the Northwestern Pacific and P&SR lines.

Freight service from Windsor south is expected to start up this year and North Bay voters may be asked to approve a commuter train that would take passengers from as far north as Clover-dale to the Larkspur ferry terminal.

And a group called Petaluma Trolley is hoping to restore service on the portion of the P&SR right-of -way that runs from the outlet mall down Water Street, across the trestle and down First Street to Foundry Wharf.