Usually, I get notifications of public events that I might be interested in, set them aside on my kitchen table, then stay at home.  But a talk about a local railroad at the relatively nearby Renton Historical Museum caught my eye.  The speaker, Kurt Armbruster, had recently published a book on the Pacific Coast Railroad.  At fifty-two I was the spring chicken amongst the two dozen gathered guests.  The railroad was a local line servicing mining in the area.  The presentation gave a history of the railroad with picture slides from the book. One of the things that surprised me was the number of coal mines in the area.  I picked up a copy on the way out.

Most of the land around the Seattle area is just glacial till.  Random rocks and soil dragged by receding ice ages.  Coal is formed when organic material is compressed under high pressure for extended periods of time.  So my understanding was that you needed actual bedrock, and the only local supply was in the Newcastle area.  But it turns out there were mines in the hill just south of Renton, in Black Diamond, and other locations.

Mining coal was a big deal for the outpost named Seattle in the post-Civil War era.  But carrying coal by cart down the hill to Lake Washington and transferring it to boats was a rough business.  There were early attempts to put in rail lines: the Lake Washington Coal Company and later the Coal Creek Railroad Company built lines from the mines to waterways, but both failed.  The Seattle Steam Company built a narrow gauge line from newcastle to new ship loading facilities in downtown Seattle.  The first steam engine arrived after a new Seattle Coal & Transport bought out that line.

In 1873 the Northern Pacific announced its western transcontinental terminus would be Tacoma and not Seattle.  This motivated city leaders to plan their own line that would reach Walla Walla, then the largest city in the territory.  With much fanfare and plans to build on the cheap the people of Seattle started to construct the Seattle & Walla Walla Railroad & Transportation Company.  As you might guess, the initial cost estimate increased by more than five times, they ran out of money, and the line stopped short at the mines.  This railroad became the Pacific Coast which continued as a standalone entity, albeit one with reduced branches until at was bought by Great Northern in 1951.

You come away from the book with two impressions.  Railroads as business entities were about as stable as furniture stores, and there were a lot of different coal mines south and east of Seattle.  The story of the Pacific Coast Railroad ends around page 42.  The remaining 60 or so pages are pictures of rail activity with detailed notations.  It’s a short book, but probably contains every surviving picture from the 1800’s.  I enjoyed the book and am glad to add it to the railroad section of my library.