The sun beats down through the windshield, heating up the dashboard and the steering wheel until they are too hot to touch. The line of cars creeps forward, stops, creeps, stops, and creeps again. They catch the light and twinkle like metallic bows on packages at Christmas. The heat is intense, and rolling down the window doesn’t help because the air is still and rank with exhaust fumes. The time on the radio says it is 5:45 p.m., meaning that the sea of traffic has flowed exactly eight miles in 30 minutes. Cars keep merging on to the road, adding to the backup, and time ticks on slowly. Out the passenger side window, following the highway and nearly buried under tall grass and weeds, lie two parallel pieces of metal that run for miles, through Sonoma county and beyond. They are fossils of a bygone era, the last symbol of a time when trains carried everyone in California home.

From 1907 to the 1950s, the Northwestern Pacific Railroad ran passenger trains next to what is now the Highway 101 corridor, bringing people from the ferry terminal in Sausalito through the Redwood Empire to Eureka. But with the opening of the Golden Gate Bridge in 1937, cars began to be more popular with travelers, and by 1958, the banshee was wailing for the train.

But now, with high gas prices and relentless traffic, some citizens of the North Bay are looking to resurrect this old mode of transportation. The people behind the Sonoma Marin Area Rail Transit [SMART] are trying to pass Measure R on the November 7 ballot to bring a commuter train system into operation by 2009.

“The main goal of SMART is to provide an alternative to the congestion on Highway 101,” says Lillian Hames, SMART’s project director. “SMART [will have] lower travel times—50 minutes from Santa Rosa to San Rafael. To drive the same distance takes 90 minutes, or two hours by bus.”

Meausre R is a quarter-cent sales tax in both Sonoma and Marin counties to fund SMART’s estimated cost of $416 million, a figure that includes 14 stations in cities from Cloverdale down to Larkspur and a 54-mile bike path that would run alongside the railway line.

According to Hames, SMART would move 5,300 commuters per day and up to 7,000 people on the bike path, eliminating an estimated 2.9 million car trips per year.
“SMART would reduce emissions by 124,000 pounds per day,” says Hames.

According to Hames, the train is made to run on biodiesel and is an independently powered vehicle with an engine under the floorboards. Each car would hold about 100 people and would travel between 45 to 50 miles per hour.

In a press release from October of 2006, The Sierra Club Sonoma Group and Redwood Chapter endorses the idea:

“The SMART train is an environmentally sound component in our effort to protect our climate and enhance our quality of life. Instead of being stuck in traffic, train commuters will have more time to be a home with their families, and to arrive home more relaxed.”

But citizen groups on the other side say that SMART won’t really make that much of a difference, in terms of traffic congestion and environmental impact. The estimated ridership of 5,300 people per day has come under fire, as has the for-now, weekday-only service schedule.

“It’s a pittance,” says Mike Arnold, from Marin Citizens for Effective Transportation, in an interview with the Petaluma Argus-Courier on September 27.

“If the train were an alternative, more people would take it,” Arnold says. But most commuters will stay away for one key reason, he said—“The train isn’t going to take you to work.”

By the time a commuter drives, takes a bus, bicycles or walks to a train station, gets on a train, then makes a third leg of his/her journey to the office, any savings over a freeway trip is long gone, Arnold said.

SMART does have nine shuttle bus routes in the works to take people from parking lots to the stations, but there is the overlying problem of getting people from their homes to the trains.

Sheila Conley, a resident of Sonoma County for over 30 years, isn’t sure if she would trade in her car for SMART.

“Four dollars [the average cost of a round-trip ticket] to Healdsburg is great,” she says. “It also does depend on how long you have to stay. When I took the ferry from Vallejo to San Francisco, I could not get back on the ferry until 5:30 p.m.--I was stuck that entire day. I would probably use [SMART] a few times.”

The historical Railroad Square in Santa Rosa offers a quick glimpse into the early 20th Century, its gray stone buildings, built by Italian stonecutters, line a grassy park where a bronze statue of Snoopy and Charlie Brown pay tribute to the late Sonoma county resident artist Charles Shultz. The original train depot from 1904, seen in Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, stands as a visitor’s bureau and museum for the Nothwestern Pacific Railroad. In 1906, when Santa Rosa had a population of barely 9,000 people, this depot saw over 100,000 people coming through on trains.

“If you walk on our streets, you are walking in history,” says Lynda Angell, president of the Historic Railroad Square Association.

Railroad Square has a chance to rekindle the past if SMART goes through. Five and a half acres of land is slated for development next to the proposed SMART depot, bringing mixed-use housing and retail opportunities to an area Angell describes as being “blighted.”

The train would give people easy access to Railroad Square’s new jewel, the Sonoma County Food and Wine Center, a marketplace showcasing local farmers, winemakers and providing culinary education.

The Greenbelt Alliance, a supporter of SMART, says on its website that the community of Santa Rosa “has a role to play in the shaping of this key downtown area… so that it becomes a more mixed, walkable community, with a high quality of life for local residents.”

Born and raised in Santa Rosa, Angell has memories of when the grass didn’t have time to grow between railroad ties.

“As a little girl I remember that whistle coming through Santa Rosa at eight o’clock at night," she says. "That long, lonely whistle.”

Northwestern Pacific Railroad history buff Harold Mentzer says that, during the railroads peak operating years, there were two passenger trains running daily from Eureka to San Francisco, via ferry (which was also owned by the train company). There was also a whole smorgasbord of streetcars, weekend picnic trains and interurbans that connected all of Sonoma and Marin counties. Couldn’t rail travel today be as simple as it was 70 years ago, once the start-up glitches were resolved?

“To understand train travel in 1930, you must understand the times. Just about everything in society revolved around trains. The trains ran on schedules, so if you depended on trains you were dependent upon their schedules,” Mentzer says. “You would leave your house in time to catch your train by hopping the streetcar that ran down your street. You'd know where to make transfers and which car line that would carry you to the depot…It was a way of life, you got use to it because it was the only way you had ever known.

“It isn't like today where you jump into your car at your pleasure, take your preferred route to 101, fight the traffic jams down to the bridge, crawl across and through the toll, more traffic through the City, find a place to park your car–-you've already paid more for gas, tolls, and parking than your 1930 round trip would have cost you–-and you still have to walk, or catch a bus or taxi to where you want to go,” Mentzer adds.

“SMART is another alternative,” says Karen Sommer, who is on the board of the Santa Rosa Chamber of Commerce. “In the long term it will serve us well, we will see less people using cars and more getting on the train.”