Years after the final train rolled down the rails, a Federal agency has approved a nearly 12-mile section of abandoned railroad for use as a trail extending the reach of Snohomish County’s iconic Centennial Trail all the way to the King County line. Snohomish County has announced that they will resume planning work for the trail in 2025 with the vision of connecting it to King County’s in-development Eastrail and, therefore, the Sammamish River and Burke-Gilman Trails.

Once complete, the Centennial Trail would span the entire length of Snohomish County. Skagit County also owns sections of the same rail line with the potential to develop it further north. In Arlington, the Centennial Trail connects to the Whitehorse Trail, a rail-trail leading to Darrington and the beautiful Mountain Loop Highway (note that the section near Arlington is currently closed due to significant slide and washout issues, though the County is working on it and hopes for construction permits soon). Down south, the City of Woodinville has already been removing the rails from their two-mile stretch connecting from the county line and planned Centennial Trail South terminus to the Sammamish River Trail near NE 175th Street.

“As of August 2024, Snohomish County concluded abandonment and railbanking of the rail line from the City of Snohomish to the King County line,” Snohomish County Parks wrote in a project update last week. “With this milestone, the County will resume trail planning in 2025 for the phased development of the trail over the next decade.” They anticipate a phased build-out because “the proposed alignment traverses areas with steep cross slopes, bridges, trestles, sloughs, and other natural features which offer a beautiful trail experience but complicated construction.” The county estimates the cost to fully build out and pave the 12-mile trail section to be $100 million, according to the Snohomish County Tribune. They currently have $2 million budgeted for design work.

King County and municipalities like Kirkland have sped up the opening of their trail sections by building them first as mostly lower-budget gravel trails that use as much of the existing rail infrastructure as possible. The ultimate plan is to fully pave the trail, but that work will take a long time and is significantly more expensive. Perhaps Snohomish County could look into a similar strategy if funding for a paved trail is not found in the near-term.

Next we just need King County and the City of Renton to start work on connecting the Eastrail to the Green River, Interurban and Cedar River Trails in order to create a fully separated bike route from Skagit County to Pierce County.

But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves here. As we know all too well in this region, trail projects often come with legal challenges from property owners. Multiple law firms (many based in Missouri) have been contacting property owners along the corridor to put together cases accusing the Federal government of allowing a change of use from rail to trail that goes against longstanding railroad easements. Hopefully these challenges stay between the Feds and the property owners and do not impact the building of the trail, but as with all these projects I won’t feel fully confident until the steamrollers are there.

For some background, the legal basis for turning an abandoned rail line into a trail, known in Federal statute as “railbanking,” was pioneered during the creation of the first section of the Burke-Gilman Trail between Matthews Beach in Seattle and Log Boom Park in Kenmore. Neighborhood advocates, the Sierra Club and, eventually, governments at the city, county and state levels all worked throughout the 1970s to convince the Interstate Commerce Commission (“ICC”) that the rail corridor should be preserved for public use rather than reverted to private ownership. The reasoning is that the corridor only has value as a complete corridor, and even one missing section will forever ruin the value of the entire corridor and prevent its future use for rail transportation or travel by any other mode. While the rail abandonment demonstrates that there is no current use case for the corridor as a railroad, who knows what the future holds? Therefore, it is in the best interests of both the public and the future of commerce if the corridors are preserved as corridors. The ICC eventually agreed with the Burke-Gilman Trail promoters, setting a precedent that was later clarified and codified in a 1980s Federal law as “railbanking.” The ICC was decommissioned in the 1990s, and most of its railroad regulation authority was transferred to the Surface Transportation Board. I wrote a whole section about the creation of the Burke-Gilman Trail in my book.

Corridors that are mostly flat with only gradual slopes that are also complete and connected are rare and special. They connect our modern communities with their pasts and hold opportunities to imagine a different future. Where communities turned their backs to the loud and dangerous railroads, turning them into trails is an invitation to turn around and look at these places in a new way. They provide entirely new connections for walking and biking transportation and a chance for people to redraw their mental maps of how their communities function. These are exciting times for trail development in our region. Decades of work have gone into making these trails possible, and we are set for sections of trail to open regularly throughout the next decade that will have a lasting impact on their communities and the entire region.

More details on the Centennial Trail South project from the Seattle Times:

About a mile due west of Thomas’ Eddy in the Bob Heirman Wildlife Park, up an unofficial trail of loose dirt and overgrowth, the future Eastrail in Snohomish County looks like it has for nearly 140 years.

Steel tracks running through forest and farm on ties still dark with creosote.

But after a July decision by the federal Surface Transportation Board, things will look a lot different for the winding, 11.9-mile segment of the trail heading south from the city of Snohomish to the county line near Woodinville.

When complete, the trail will be part of a growing trail network spanning the region that connects to the urban bikeways in the Puget Sound area. The trails offer recreational users plenty of miles to cover, but also act as bicycle “super highways,” providing commuters an option to get from home or work to transit, without having to navigate a road system dominated by automobiles.

“The benefits of trails grows exponentially when they’re connected into networks,” said Eric Oberg, with the national Rails to Trails Conservancy, who called trails like Eastrail “utilitarian infrastructure to get around.”

“It’s all about connectivity and networks,” Oberg said. “That’s why people in Tacoma should give a damn about trail development in Everett. It’s all part of this regional vision.”

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