DUNSMUIR, Calif. — Amtrak may soon croon a swan song on the Dunsmuir platform, and that has city officials singing the blues, the Sacramento Bee reported.
The company has told the historic railroad town to provide a heated depot — with bathroom facilities — by Dec. 1 or its passenger trains will no longer stop here.
“We’re asking Dunsmuir to make the necessary improvements,” Amtrak spokeswoman Vernae Graham said. If that doesn’t happen, the railroad may take its business to a hesitant, but willing, neighboring city to the north.
Consider that since the 1880s trains have pulled into the Dunsmuir station, flanked by the Sacramento River coursing through wooded hills on one side and rows of brick buildings on the other.
Now, Dunsmuir is the only town in Siskiyou County where Amtrak’s Coast Starlight offers service. Making daily Los Angeles-to-Seattle runs, the southbound train stops at 12:20 a.m. and the northbound at 5:04 a.m.
But in winter, waiting outside for a middle-of-the-night train is not the kind of adventure Amtrak envisions for its passengers.
“We are very committed to that area,” Graham said, “but Dunsmuir will have to give us an upgraded facility before we’ll stay.”
Passengers in the past shared a dilapidated building that Union Pacific Railroad used as an office and a place where employees gathered for crew changes. UP recently relocated its hub operations to a renovated building on the opposite side of the tracks.
“That left us without a depot,” Dunsmuir Mayor Wayne Meredith said. Now officials are scrambling to find a way — and the funding — to meet the December deadline.
“We’ve been talking to Union Pacific to see if we can work out a lease with them,” he said. The plan would be to upgrade the old depot, and eventually add a museum.
“This has been a train town since its inception,” the mayor said, adding that the City Council was unified in its desire to preserve passenger service.
Dunsmuir may have the history, but its tourist-oriented neighbor 10 miles north might get the depot. Three Amtrak representatives met with Mount Shasta officials in September.
“We don’t want to leave the area without passenger service,” said Bob Christofferson, Mount Shasta interim city manager. “But we made it clear to Amtrak that we don’t want to upstage a sister city.”
If Dunsmuir can’t work out a solution, Mount Shasta is waiting patiently to jump aboard.
Planners have designated the old train station as an interim spot, and have earmarked an unused mill site for a future intermodal facility.