By Tom Fucoloro in the Seattle Times
My note: Our first home (rental) in 1969 was near those railroad tracks and Matthew’s Beach. Sandy Wood and Jim Todd lived near us and we would gather the neighborhood to discuss world events. Being frustrated and wanting something more tangible, our group came up with the idea of a trail replacing the tracks. We can thank Sandy, Jim and that neighborhood group for getting the attention of Mayor Wes Ullman and King County Executive John Spellman.
The Time’s Editor’s note: The following is an edited excerpt from Chapter 4 of “Biking Uphill in the Rain: The Story of Seattle from Behind the Handlebars,” a 2024 Washington State Book Award finalist written by Tom Fucoloro (University of Washington Press, 2023; released in paperback this month).
Seattle experienced a resurgence in bicycle use in the 1970s, thanks to the availability of better, cheaper bikes; a Boeing Bust and recession that encouraged less expensive forms of transportation — and research into a forgotten story about two men who created a railroad that helped save Seattle.
THE RAILROAD LINE through northeast Seattle had not always been as quiet as it was in the 1960s, with only a few train runs a month. Neighbors at that time got used to walking along the rails without much concern that a locomotive might come barreling down on them. Most rail traffic had been routed to other lines with more capacity and faster routes to major port terminals. But without those rails, Seattle as we know it today might not even exist.
Much of the early white settler investment in Seattle had a major prize in mind: the port terminus of Northern Pacific’s Transcontinental Railroad. Northern Pacific had indicated that it intended to terminate its transcontinental line in Tacoma instead of Seattle, so settlers gathered resources to build Seattle’s first railroad in an attempt to connect the line to the south of the city.
But the narrow-gauge Seattle and Walla Walla Railroad never made it anywhere close to Walla Walla, as the name suggested. Instead, it barely made it beyond Seattle city limits, reaching Renton and Newcastle to the south and east of Lake Washington. Though much of the route eventually would become a major rail corridor, at the time it was not enough to change Northern Pacific’s decision to make Tacoma its primary terminus and run only branchline service to Seattle.
So Thomas Burke and Daniel Gilman launched a rather desperate plan to take their city’s future into their own hands. Rather than try to hopelessly lobby Northern Pacific to change its terminus plan, these men founded the Seattle, Lake Shore and Eastern Railway in 1885 to force Northern Pacific’s hand or go broke trying. They immediately got to work investing a significant amount of their own money, gathering contributions from other area settlers and raising investment funds from people back East.
The plan was to build a railroad north from the downtown waterfront to the nearby industrial town of Ballard, then head east across the city and around the north end of Lake Washington. From there, the line would split into two directions. One line was supposed to head north to Canada via the town of Snohomish, while the other would head east to Snoqualmie Pass via the town of Gilman (now known as Issaquah). Seattle provided space along the waterfront for the railroad, then the boosters worked to convince settler landowners along the planned path to donate the land needed for the railway. (continued)