(The following story by Chris Bowman appeared on the Sacramento Bee website on March 19.)
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The only smoke spewing from the site of Sacramento’s spectacular railroad trestle fire today should be the soot of pile drivers sinking supports for a replacement bridge.
By Sunday morning, Union Pacific Railroad contractors had extinguished and hauled away the last of the smoldering timbers from the inferno, which broke Thursday evening under circumstances still being investigated.
“They have started preparing the ground for driving the steel piling,” said Mark Davis, spokesman at Union Pacific headquarters in Omaha, Neb.
Stoked by logs preserved with creosote oil, the fire swiftly engulfed the century-old trestle, issued towering columns of coal-black smoke, detoured interstate freight and disrupted commuter service between Sacramento, Roseville and Auburn.
Though the charred rubble is gone, the stink of creosote lingered Sunday.
A steady stream of onlookers in summer clothes and with toddlers and family dogs in tow scampered up the bank of a levee to view the staging grounds for reconstruction.
Robert Hughes, a state Fish and Game spokesman who has observed the activity since Friday afternoon, marveled at the pace of the railroad contractors.
“These people are fast; they’re rolling,” Hughes said against a backdrop of hard-hatted workers assembling a giant crane for the pile driver. The diesel-powered driver will pound into the ground bunches of 60-foot-long columns to anchor a more fire-resistant trestle of concrete and steel.
Union Pacific is able to bypass the numerous and time-consuming government environmental permits because the reconstruction simply replaces rather than expands the railroad crossing, Hughes said.
The new structure will have two tracks and occupy the same 1,400-foot-long path as the timber trestle did in the American River Parkway near Cal Expo.
While no environmental impact reviews are required, Fish and Game officials have stationed themselves at the site to keep a close watch on the around-the-clock operation.
“We’re here to make sure it’s cleaned up properly and to make sure it is restored as close as possible to what it was before the fire,” Hughes said.
The parkway, a floodplain, is a prime bicycling route through the heart of metropolitan Sacramento and a wildlife corridor for various mammals, birds and insects that depend on riparian vegetation for at least a portion of their life cycle.
Hughes said the debris was taken to a Sacramento-area landfill authorized to accept hazardous waste. Hughes and railroad officials said Sunday they did not know the name or exact location of the dump.
Railroad officials also expected workers to finish building a rail connection Sunday in Marysville that will enable freight traffic from the Pacific Northwest to detour around the destroyed trestle, a mainline track.
The 90-mile detour will amount to delays of two to 24 hours, depending on whether rail cars need to be re-sorted at the Roseville train yard, Davis said. The detour will double the normal amount of train traffic on the Marysville-Sacramento and Marysville-Roseville tracks, he said.
“We are urging motorists to use extra caution at railroad crossings,” Davis said.
The American River Parkway timber trestle was one of many built to traverse mountainous areas and floodplains as approaches to bridges over rivers.
Kyle Wyatt, curator of history and technology at the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento, said the Sacramento trestle dated to 1907, though major portions of it had been rebuilt.
Another trestle previously formed the approach to the American River. But it, too, was destroyed by fire — in 1867, Wyatt said.
That blaze was the work of an arsonist, who was never caught, Wyatt said.