LeBaron: Glory days of North Coast railroads are history

We are watching the methodical progress of Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit, or SMART, our long-promised commuter system, as it moves forward from 2002, when the district was formed, to a date in the now-foreseeable (2016) future.

Being of a historical bent, we cannot resist the temptation to take one of those long looks in our rear view mirror. This one focuses on another railroad project that seemed to take forever a hundred years ago.

The plans and stops and starts of Northwestern Pacific’s rail link between the Bay Area and Humboldt Bay came to a glorious conclusion in October of 1914 with a gold-spike ceremony at a remote spot known as Cain Rock in the Eel River canyon.

(The centennial of that occasion will be celebrated Oct. 25 by the NWP Historical Society at their restoration yard in Petaluma at the corner of Washington and Baylis streets. Details can be found at the Society’s website: www.nwprrhs.org.)

The triumphant completion of tracks to Eureka - with a lot more corporate maneuvering than SMART - took as many years or more to create. Which is somewhat surprising in an age when railroads were still the primary way that freight and people moved around this nation.

By 1914 Teddy Roosevelt’s flurry of a presidency had busted J.P. Morgan’s East Coast rail empire … but the railroads were still big players, particularly in the Far West, merging and consolidating and trading stock for control, pretty much like the money lenders and the tech pioneers are doing today.

The North Coast map was criss-crossed by small railroads as well as dotted lines for many surveyed rail routes that would never be built, their plans squashed under Mr. Firestone’s rubber tires as the automobile took charge of transportation.

But the yearned-for connection between San Francisco and Humboldt bays seemed automobile-proof in 1907. There was no highway north of Ukiah and not even a road considered passable in winter north of Willits. And the money to be made hauling redwood lumber to a fast-growing urban area was attractive to say the least.

Two companies vied for control of the North Coast - the Southern Pacific and the Santa Fe. The maneuvering between these two rail giants (SP was a subsidiary of Union Pacific) makes today’s mergers, splits and takeovers pale in contrast.

These two players bought and sold no fewer than 43 small rail lines to form the Northwestern Pacific and achieve a single railroad by 1914.

At the turn of the 20th century, Santa Fe had control of the Eel River & Eureka line, the California Midland (Hydesville to Carlotta) and the California Northern (Eureka to Arcata) plus Pacific Lumber Co.’s rails south of Scotia in Humboldt County, to name just a few.

Southern Pacific, meanwhile, had achieved an agreement with the rail tycoon of the southern end, A.W. Foster, whose San Francisco and North Pacific was the original standard-gauge line in Marin, Sonoma and Mendocino counties (and with the old North Pacific Coast narrow gauge that ran along Tomales Bay to the Russian River, not really a player in this adventure).

By 1903, the northern end of the Foster empire, the optimistically named San Francisco and Eureka Railroad, also in SP’s sphere, had extended from Ukiah to Sherwood, north of Willits.

The missing link in a through line was the 100 miles between Sherwood and Shively, a region where no road that could conceivably be called a highway existed.

At the north end was all that redwood lumber stacked up at the port of Eureka, awaiting sporadic arrivals of lumber schooners. At the south was San Francisco, Oakland and environs, sprawling along both shores of the bay, begging for lumber. While the transportation companies fought it out, money waited to be made.

The need took on more immediacy when the earthquake of 1906 increased the demand for building supplies. In 1907, the two transportation giants took all their little railroads and merged, creating a joint ownership in a company to be known as the Northwestern Pacific Railroad.

The business wars were resolved but the battle with nature was just beginning. Each of the parties had their own favorite routes - Santa Fe had hoped to follow the South Fork of the Eel. Southern Pacific wanted to go down Outlet Creek from Willits to the main Eel River and follow that canyon.

The route was decided by a panel of geologists and rail and bridge engineers, who were generally regarded as the best in the country.

They may never have had a tougher assignment. The study of the two routes meant packing their transits and tools on mules and themselves onto horses to follow the two branches of the Eel. Treks completed, calculations made, they agreed that the main river canyon was the way to go.

Work began in October of 1907. It took a full seven years to complete. The canyon was, first and foremost, inaccessible. But it was also unremittingly steep and vulnerable to the weather - particularly to mudslides that could bring down boulders as big as a locomotive. The big “workhorse” locomotives that started from the north had to be transported by ship from the rail yard at Tiburon to Eureka. Winter rains not only stopped the work, they undid much of the excavation with mud and rock slides. The route had 30 tunnels to be blasted through mountains. In some of those seven years, a total of 25 miles was considered a triumph.

The ongoing instability of the terrain was immediately apparent to the crowd of “big-wig” passengers on the “Sequoia Express” that set out from Sausalito early on Oct. 23.

After NWP’s president, using a silver maul, pounded the gold spike in place and the important passengers, including San Francisco’s mayor (and future California governor) James “Sunny Jim” Rolph, made their speeches, the crowd learned that a rocky hillside had slid onto the tracks about 30 miles north.

So they had plenty of time to view Cain Rock up close while crews frantically cleared the way. In Eureka, a patient crowd waited to welcome the first through train with a parade. It marched off as planned - only, at 3 o’clock in the morning.

Those of us lucky enough to have made a trip through that canyon can attest to the wonders of it. Since no roads access the area it was not unusual to see a bear padding along the riverbank or a herd of elk grazing in a meadow. When the flow in the river was clear and the sun shone, passengers could see salmon, gauging their size in the river’s pools.

The Willits-Eureka link was closed in the late 1990s, a victim not only of the weather and increased costs but of Greyhound buses and truck-trailers on a smooth highway up the South Fork. The last regular passenger train from Eureka was in 1958. Some freight moved, as ownerships changed, into the ‘90s, with an occasional excursion for passengers.

The NWP Historical Society’s homage to the landmark event of 100 years ago may seem a little odd, considering that the trains no longer run - and probably never will again - from Willits to Eureka.

But railroad historians are not only diligent, they are determined to preserve the stories, the memories, the folklore even, of the grand adventures of railroading on the North Coast.

In Petaluma next Saturday, adults and kids alike will have an opportunity to view a film of the 1914 ceremony, climb aboard a locomotive and a caboose, take a (slow) speeder ride on a side track, operate wig-wag signals, and sit down for a visit with a locomotive engineer.

All this, but no rock slides. The “glory days” are history.

Editor’s note: A previous version of this story gave an incorrect date for the planned centennial celebration of the Northwestern Pacific’s “golden spike” ceremony. The celebration is set for Oct. 25.