A common complaint about the grandiose California Forever “new town” project in Solano County is that the site is just too far out there. The few 1970s New Towns that succeeded through to the present day were only 10-20 miles from growing job centers; the Solano site is a good 50+ miles from any major job centers (Berkeley or San Francisco) and 70+ miles from Silicon Valley itself. Distance wouldn’t be such a problem if only transport connections were better.

Ironically, though, the California Forever site is bisected by the remains of the Sacramento Northern Railway, an electric interurban railroad that once shuttled passengers between the Bay Area, Sacramento, and even far beyond Sacramento to Chico. Not only does much of the rail corridor still exist through there, but 21 miles of track is owned and preserved by the Western Railway Museum, which even maintains 5.5 miles (south of route 12) with live 1200V catenary — on which it runs former East Bay interurban equipment.

It’s puzzling that WRM’s track doesn’t seem to figure into California Forever’s plans at all so far, even as some kind of “future connection.” That may be because it’s of little practical use: even though the Sacramento Northern in theory once reached Pittsburg (now a terminal station for BART), it did so via a time-consuming car ferry across the busy, windy Suisun Bay. A new bridge would be prohibitively expensive; a ferry would be both difficult and silly, as both ends now sit in wetlands and some kind of shuttle would still be needed on the Pittsburg end (which is miles short of BART).

(This post began as a LinkedIn comment for Benjamin Schneider’s blog.)