About 4 years ago my travels took me through Arcadia and Eureka, Calif. Exploring the latter city, I was very surprised to see how much railroad equipment was stranded in this northern California outpost. There were maybe four very old Geeps parked near the Eureka yard office as well; but alas, the old rust atop every rail revealed that nothing had been going on there in quite awhile. After the Espee sold the line, a series of shortline operators tried to make a go of it. But none were successful.
Has anyone been looking to reopen the line?
Or, conversely, has anyone been looking to either barge or truck the stranded freight cars and locomotives out of Eureka?
Actually they did have it running all the way to Eureka until 1998. The entire railroad or close to the entire railroad has been closed for almost the last 7 years.
Here are the two most likely scenarios for NWP.
They just give up.
They get it open only to have another major landslide, which will premenantly close the line.
The NWP is dead and it’s going to stay that way. The whole thing has been joke. It seems the people in charge (or individual I’m not sure) are spending the money they do get on justifying there existance and convincing the California government of the need to re-open the line. The fact is there is no real traffic to be had anymore. The bigger mils are gone and what’s left trucks there product to a re-load in Redding (on the UP). Eureka has dreams of there port becoming a player but I don’t see that happening. That line was a maintainance intensive line prone to washouts and flooding at mother nature’s whim. It was barely justifying it’s existance when it had lots of traffic. Now that the traffic is gone there is no reason for them to open the line (although some refuse to see it that way).
Over on the Altimont press forum they are almost constantly re-hashing the drama of the NWP. It get quite entertaining at times and some of those guys take it way too personaly.
And by the way, They are now known as the North Coast Rail Road.