(The following story by John Dickey appeared on the Appeal-Democrat website on December 2.)
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — When rail lines are removed from Bridge Street, one of the last remaining pieces of a railway system that served the area for much of the 20th century will be gone.
The Union Pacific railroad is planning on abandoning and removing its Yuba City track after a major cannery customer stopped using it.
The rails that run along Bridge Street were once part of a rail line that used electric interurbans to provide a key source of transportation in a time when few people owned cars.
“I remember the trains running down the streets in Marysville,” Dick Marquette said. “They were the big green interurbans.”
The Sacramento Northern Railway ran people and freight from Chico, its northernmost point, to Marysville and Yuba City, all the way down to Sacramento and Oakland. A spur served towns west of Yuba City, ending in Colusa.
Built in 1905 to 1906 by the Northern Electric Railway to replace mule-drawn streetcars, the line from Chico through Live Oak was the Sacramento Northern’s main line to Sacramento. The Sacramento Northern took it over in 1918, running passenger trains until 1941. The railroad changed hands more than once, becoming a subsidiary of the Western Pacific in 1925. The Union Pacific Railroad acquired the Western Pacific in 1982.
It was in 1918 that the Sacramento Northern combined the Oakland, Antioch & Eastern and the Northern Electric railways, providing passenger travel all the way from Chico to the Bay area.
Marquette rode the cars as a young boy when he took a trip to San Francisco and the Golden Gate International Exposition in 1939.
Marquette said the trip from Marysville to San Francisco took about four hours – not much longer than it would take now by car over traffic-snarled highways.
The electric trains were fast, Marquette recalls.
“Each of the cars had its own electric motor,” Marquette said. “It could go 70 mph.”
They had five green cars, including an observation car called The Bidwell.
“They went to a lot of work to build it,” Marquette said. “It was very beautiful.”
When he made the trip to San Francisco, the interurban train crossed over Suisun Bay to San Francisco via ferry.
While overhead wires were used through Marysville and Yuba City, most of the line was powered by a third rail.
The Sacramento Northern ended passenger service between Chico and San Francisco – running through Marysville and Yuba City – in 1940.
Street cars continued to run between Marysville and Yuba City until they were replaced by buses in 1942.
Even though passenger travel ended in 1940s as automobile ownership increased, the railway continued to be a key transportation link for freight.
The last electric freight operations in California took place in the Twin Cities in 1965. After that, diesel locomotives were used to pull the trains.
When Yuba City-area resident Dick Dorn came here in the 1970s, he became fascinated with the freight trains that were still running on the tracks, snapping numerous photos and writing an article with John Walker for Pacific Rail News in 1992.
Another important source of information on the Sacramento Northern is a 1962 book called “Interurbans,” published and edited by Ira Swett.
Like the passenger runs, the freight service eventually fell by the wayside.
The last active customer the Sacramento Northern served in Marysville was the Appeal-Democrat, Dorn said. There was a line in Marysville that went along Second Street. Rail deliveries to the newspaper ended in 1986 when the newspaper moved from its plant at Third and G streets.
A freight station office at 545 Bridge St. in Yuba City was closed in 1983, and Chico had freight trains running through town until 1985.
But in 1983, freight trains still rumbled through Tierra Buena at the west edge of Yuba City, north through the streets of Live Oak and then on to Chico two to three times a week. The train went through Chico, down the Esplanade, and continued out to the Chico Municipal Airport.
That year, a railroad official explained the move to abandon the Chico line in the next three years, stating in a Jan. 8, 1983, Appeal-Democrat article that the drop in business had been “precipitous” because of competition by trucks.
“Preliminary studies show there’s been a 25 to 50 percent decline in shipping from the area over the past year,” Eugene Toler, a Western Pacific attorney, said. Western Pacific was the parent company of the Sacramento Northern for much of its life until the Western Pacific was itself absorbed by the Union Pacific.
While the economy was slow then, Toler attributed the sharp decline mostly to deregulation in the trucking industry, which led to an increase in emphasis on that mode of transportation.
Yuba City hung on to its trains for several more years.
Dorn was there when the next to the last freight train to Yuba City on the former Sacramento Northern line rolled through on Nov. 26, 2002. The train was diesel-powered, having switched over from electric freight locomotives in 1965. The last train ran over the line a few weeks later to pick up a freight car left on a side track.
“This was rather significant because this particular locomotive, that ran the (next to the) last train, once was a Western Pacific diesel,” Dorn said.
The Harter Packing Co., located in back of the Home Depot store on Colusa Highway, was the last Yuba City shipper to use freight trains.
“When that quit, that was kind of the end,” Dorn said.