Ukiah depot all dressed up, but still no trains

<p>Ukiah's historic train depot at last is restored to its former glory following a fitful, eight-year, $439,000 renovation that is just a few details shy of complete.</p><p>“It's wonderful the way it looks,” said Judy Pruden, a Ukiah planning commissioner and local historian.</p><p>City officials now are seeking a tenant or tenants for the 1929 Colonial Revival-style building, one of the last vestiges of a once thriving passenger rail service.</p><p>Train enthusiasts dream of a time when rail passengers again utilize the depot, but for now they'll have to settle for a business that is somehow related to transit, a requirement of one of the restoration project's funding sources.</p><p>The Chamber of Commerce is among those interested in occupying the building, said Assistant City Manager Sage Sangiacomo. Other uses could include a cafe or transportation center for bus service, officials said.</p><p>Whatever goes in should include a tourist information center or booth, said Ukiah Mayor Benj Thomas.</p><p>The depot, freshly coated in butter-hued paint and its bricks cleaned and looking new, is located on Perkins Street midway between Highway 101 and downtown. It was once a Ukiah hub and may regain its place if the new courthouse proposed for Ukiah is built on 11 acres adjacent to the depot, the city's preferred site for that project.</p><p>Should planned passenger service ever be extended through Sonoma County to Mendocino County, it would further the area's draw.</p><p>But regular passenger train service is a distant dream, despite the North Coast Railroad Authority's plan to resume freight service in a few years.</p><p>Passenger trains are faster than freight haulers and require enhancements to rail lines, said NCRA Executive Director Mitch Stogner. Passenger service also would require funding to make up the gap between the cost of transporting passengers and income from fares, he said.</p><p>That likely would require that Mendocino County voters approve a funding source such as the sales tax Sonoma and Marin counties voters passed for the Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit passenger train project, Stogner said.</p><p>Ukiah has been without regularly scheduled passenger service since 1942, said Pruden, who's still hoping it will return to Ukiah in her lifetime.</p><p>“I had hoped by this time you could get on a train and get off at the San Francisco Airport,” she said.</p><p>Excursion trains passed through Ukiah periodically in the mid 1990s, but the depot has been largely deserted other than some use as an office by the railroad's owners. Freight trains ceased their rumble through Ukiah in the early 1990s, Pruden said.</p><p>The current train depot was the third to be built in Ukiah; the predecessor were more modest, wooden structures, Pruden said. The first was built in 1889, when rail service to Ukiah began. Now-defunct fruit and vegetable packing and canning facilities and lumber mills cropped up around the rail line and depot.</p><p>The depot rehabilitation was funded in part by state transportation funds and in part by Ukiah redevelopment funds. The city commissioned the restoration, but the depot remains under the ownership of the rail line owner, the publicly owned North Coast Railroad Authority. The city has a contract to lease the depot for $1 a year for at least 50 years.</p><p>Both parties agree that should passenger rail service resume, the depot would be called back to it's original duty. “The lease does provide for that,” Sangiacomo said.</p><p>A dedication ceremony and plaque placement for the depot is expected to take place next month.</p>