SPOKANE, Wash. — Rathdrum’s request to Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway is reasonable: If your nearby refueling depot is going to attract more trains, please sink or elevate your tracks so you won’t destroy our downtown, according to an editorial in the Spokesman-Review.
Rathdrum already has closed one of its two downtown entrances from state Highway 53 and would have to close the other after the depot opens, for safety’s sake, unless the railroad cooperates. If the Mill Street crossing also is shut, the struggling downtown would be isolated from highway traffic and half of Rathdrum’s residents — and it would be doomed.
That means the $850,000 project to spruce up downtown by installing streets, sidewalks and water lines last fall would have been a waste of money.
The railroad deserves to be commended for the way it has worked with city officials, to date, to offset the harm that will be done when the depot opens and when a second — and even a third — set of tracks are added. But more needs to be done. BNSF should seriously consider the resolution passed this summer by the Rathdrum council. Or it should provide funding to plan and construct a good, alternative downtown route off Highway 53.
Rathdrum has been linked to railroads since it was established as a townsite in the early 1880s. By 1883 miners rushing to the Coeur d’Alenes, in what is now Shoshone County, caught the Northern Pacific Railway to Rathdrum, a stage to Coeur d’Alene and then a passenger boat up Lake Coeur d’Alene and the Coeur d’Alene River. Wyatt Earp got to our mining country that way.
The railroad meant prosperity then, and it does now, too — but not for Rathdrum, the first seat of Kootenai County. The depot, two miles west of Rathdrum’s downtown, will enable BNSF to remain competitive with truckers and other railroads, as well as combat rail congestion in Seattle. Although the railroad remains an important cog in the transportation system of the Inland Northwest, it has overstayed its welcome on Rathdrum’s Main Street.
Downtown Rathdrum and Highway 53 run parallel for a few blocks, bisected by the BNSF tracks. In May the city closed one of the two downtown crossings, at historic McCartney Street, after learning the grade prevented a crossing gate from being installed. Even a small increase in traffic, from the current 60 trains per day, would have closed the crossing anyway. The closure of the Mill Street crossing is inevitable for the same reason, once the depot opens.
Without the crossings, Highway 53 traffic and much of Rathdrum will have to backtrack considerably to reach downtown. Response times for emergency vehicles will increase. Resident Richard Laws, who lobbied for the city resolution to the railroad, predicted reasonably that City Hall will be the only open business downtown once 100 to 150 trains are rumbling through Rathdrum — and that Main Street property values will be “in the sewer.”
BNSF is trying to be a good corporate citizen. It spent $120,000 to build a pedestrian tunnel for schoolchildren walking from Main Street to Highway 53. It gave a $200,000 firetruck to the Rathdrum Fire Department. It plans to build a $1.5 million underpass at Greensferry Road.
However, its biggest test of corporate citizenship will be in helping Rathdrum survive.