Welcome to TrainBoard! Please tell us a little about your rail hobby interests. Are you a fan? Collector? Modeler? History buff? Some of all?
Welcome aboard, Jon. We would indeed be interested to know what interests it is that brought you here, and hopefully you will find much of interest and use here.
I play with train simulators, Auran/Trainz/2012, (the Mojave Subdivision with SP SD40-T-2 engines is my favorite: I love scenic mountain railroading with tunnels, bridges, rivers, forests and trestles) and have a few Lionel trains in my storage unit and no space to run them. I have this hankering for rail service to be restored to Humboldt Bay, California following the closure of the Eel River Canyon line in the late 1990's. NWP RR still owns right-of-way there today, I believe. I also have this fantasy that if I were super rich, I would build and start my own shortline American RR in the West, mainly to connect Humboldt Bay area, CA with the UP line in the Sacramento Valley. I am a fan of the use of rail transportation as much as practical and possible and would like to see our nation's RR system even expand over the future. Much of America's overland freight could be diverted from trucks back to rail.
Welcome aboard, Jon. That Humboldt Bay rebuild would be quite the project. I think the Eel River would continue to fight it.
My plan would NOT be to use MOST of the original Eel River right-of-way of NWP and also historically, SP, but to INSTEAD attempt to acquire a brand-new right-of-way right across Trinity and Shasta Counties from the East and possibly connect with UP in Tehama County near Red Bluff. Weaverville, CA would be one of my stops in between. The Eel River Canyon has proven for a century to be geologically unstable for railroad use. I think the rock-solid banks of the Trinity, Mad and Van Duzen Rivers should be much more stable for trackage. A thorough geological survey would have to be conducted be for one rail spike is even driven anyway. I would connect at the NWP right-of-way, in theory, in Humboldt County near the Eel River at Alton north past the troubled parts of this river. Does Trinity County and the Trinity National Forest want a new RR line coming through? I would use the existing NWP right-of-way from Scotia to Arcata. There is no geological trouble in this section of existing RR right-of-way. Only going along the Eel River banks into the mountain valley south of Scotia toward Willits, CA in lower Mendocino County has there been major headaches for almost 100 years.
HI Jon. I'll add my welcome to TrainBoard. Glad you have joined us. How is the railroad project coming around in Folsom?
Hi Jon, welcome, my name is John and I'm over in Roseville. Always good to se more Sacramento area people.
The "railroad project" is all "on paper" for now. Thus far it is something of a "train to nowhere". :teeth:
