Through a Google alert I got a link to a subscriber only thread on the Zephyr Train for sale. Since I don’t have a subscription I can’t reply to it. So I thought I would start a thread with a reply where anyone can signup and reply.
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The last outsider to visit was a think 328 in 1995.
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The city of Stillwater has been fighting the Sierra Club and other extremists for years to get its aged 1930s lift bridge replaced with a modern 4 lane bridge across the St.Croix for decades. Daily every weekday morning, traffic backs up 2 miles on the Wisconsin side to cross the bridge into Minnesota, and in the evening rush hour one mile on the Minnesota side through downtown Stillwater, to get back into Wisconsin. The RR tracks linking the Zephyr to the UP tracks that begin next to Sunnyside Marina are one more hurdle to replacing the old bridge with a new one. In 2005 the city of Stillwater through the court system forced the abandonment of the tracks between the Zephyr and the UP tracks because they had not been used in 10 years and there was a washout just south of downtown. The tracks through downtown Stillwater were removed in the summer of 2005 accept for where they crossed streets. Several of them had blacktop put in the flangeway. I “think” but am not sure those tracks were owned by BN. The Zephyrs ownership of the tracks ends about 200 feet south of the Zephyr depot building.
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There is a washout below the tracks just south of downtown. Washout is about 10 feet across and less than 10 feet deep.
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Tracks leading up to the crossing at Sunnyside Marina have small trees growing through them.
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The rails at the crossing going into Sunnyside Marina were removed summer of 2010. The driveway was graded lower in that section and repaved to below the bottom of the rails height. Just south of that driveway is UP track. It is used for bringing in coal trains for the power plant. There is a small yard just for empty and full aluminum coal cars.
Other than trucking the tra