Feds OK key stretch of Eastrail in Snohomish County

By Nicholas Deshais / The Seattle Times

CATHCART — 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.”

But first, the trail must be built.

“This is the last key to unlocking the northern section,” Katherine Hollis, executive director of Eastrail Partners, said of the federal decision. “There’s still a lot of work, in terms of funding and planning, but this is a huge step.”

Emily Griffith, a senior park planner with the county leading the project to convert the rail line into a walking and biking trail, said the county has been anticipating the decision for up to eight years, which she called a “major hurdle for us.” Hurdle surmounted, Griffith estimated it could take more than a decade to complete this part of the trail, and cost more than $100 million.

Before then, some adjacent landowners are going to get compensated by the federal government, as the once private railroad is converted for public use. The corridor, which saw its last train run in 2020, remains closed and off-limits to the public.

Lindsay Brinton, a St. Louis-based lawyer who specializes in such rail-trail “takings” lawsuits, said she’s won millions in similar cases, including a 2024 case in St. Petersburg, Florida, where three property owners along an abandoned 0.86-mile railroad easement received nearly $17.9 million.

“We have contacted about 150 landowners who have the eligibility to file a claim for compensation,” said Brinton, who’s with the firm Lewis Rice. “We plan to file our case later this month … Landowners whose constitutional rights have been violated will get compensated one way or the other.”

Eastrail grows

The history of the northern section of the Eastrail starts in 1887, 1982 or 2009, depending how you look at it.

In 1887, the Seattle, Lake Shore & Eastern Railway finally reached Woodinville from Ballard, a corridor that was not only part of the ultimately successful effort in the late 1800s to lure an intercontinental rail line to the fledgling Seattle, but also the route of the Burke-Gilman Trail, one of the nation’s first rail-to-trail conversions.

In 1982, with 12 miles of the Burke-Gilman already open to the public, John Wynne, a future Republican legislator from Lake Stevens, helped conceive the trail as a north-south route connecting Woodinville to Skagit County. The bulk of that vision, the Centennial Trail, began construction in 1989 and runs 30 miles north of Snohomish to the Nakashima Barn near the county line.

It wasn’t until 2009 that the Port of Seattle bought the 42 miles between Snohomish and Renton, now known as the Eastrail, from BNSF Railway for $81 million, with plans to sell the line to local governments.

Since then, as King and Snohomish counties purchased the right of way from the port, the trail’s moved apace.

In 2015, the first segment of Eastrail opened, as the 5.75-mile Cross Kirkland Corridor. In 2018, it was extended south to Bellevue’s Spring District. The trail between Hazelwood and Newcastle Beach Park opened in 2021.

The trail took a leap forward this year as King County began rehabilitating the Wilburton Trestle, a 120-year-old, 1,000-foot trestle on the trail that will be completed in 2026 with funding from the King County parks levy, Amazon, the state’s sale of carbon credits, Bellevue and Kaiser Permanente. The county also opened the trail’s new Northeast Eighth Street Bridge over one of Bellevue’s busiest streets and directly adjacent to Wilburton Station, a stop on the 2 Line light rail.

In June, the federal government showered $30 million in grant funding on the trail, with $5 million for trail planning in Woodinville and $25 million toward retrofitting the bridge over Interstate 90, a graffiti-covered monolith just west of the freeway’s junction with Interstate 405.

There’s plenty to do. On the northern segment alone, the rails must be removed and the bed paved an acceptable 10- to 12-feet wide. Parking lots and trailheads must be built. The route has seven elevated crossings and 13 street-level crossings, and Griffith’s team is working with the county public works department to improve the roads it passes. There are also more than 60 culverts along the route that need to be dealt with.

And then there’s the segment’s crown jewel, and biggest cost: the nearly half-mile trestle over the Snohomish River, which was estimated to cost $18 million to retrofit six years ago.

Griffith is excited for the challenges ahead, but acknowledged she’s learned from the work improving the route to the south.

“While we’ve been waiting for our turn at the dance, we’ve been absorbing” what King County, Kirkland and others have done, Griffith said.

No trial for trail

In July, the Surface Transportation Board, an independent federal agency with broad regulatory oversight of railroads, approved the “abandonment” of the line, allowing it to be used as a trail.

“Nothing can be done by anybody, nobody can touch a rail line or do anything to it, until there’s a decision by the Surface Transportation Board,” said Oberg, the national Rails to Trails Conservancy’s Midwest regional director and the organization’s go-to on railbanking, rail abandonments and takings claims.

The board’s decision allows the corridor to be railbanked, meaning the corridor will be preserved for potential future use as a rail, while allowing interim trail use.

Many rails, including this one, were built on easements that had reversionary clauses saying if the corridor ceases to be rail, the land will revert to the adjacent landowner. By banking the rail, those clauses aren’t triggered, Oberg said.

“This is essentially a title transfer,” he said.

Washington state law says once the rail is gone, the easement is lifted, and the land reverts to adjacent property owners, but it’s overridden by federal law. The land taking is legal, but the Fifth Amendment allows landowners to seek “just compensation” if private property is taken for public use, said Brinton, the St. Louis lawyer.

“When they’re finished using that line, the easement should be extinguished,” Brinton said. “What’s happened now is the federal government has preempted state law, and is taking these landowners’ reversionary rights.”

Brinton is not the first lawyer to sue over rail-trail projects. A quick internet search turned up five other U.S. law firms with “rails-to-trails lawyers” promising to uphold property rights.

The first case to successfully challenge a rail-trail taking and win compensation under the Fifth Amendment was Preseault v. United States, in 1996, which stemmed from a rail-trail built near Lake Champlain in Vermont and wound up at the U.S. Supreme Court.

Similar cases won’t reach such heights, Oberg said.

“The Department of Justice has for more than a decade taken the stance that they are just going to negotiate these out of court and not go to trial,” Oberg said. “It’s going to be settled.”

Oberg made sure to note these lawsuits “are between landowners and the federal government” and wouldn’t hold up or prevent trail construction. Most important, he said, whatever money landowners will get comes out of federal coffers, not from local dollars.

But to get compensation, landowners have to “affirmatively sue,” Brinton said. That’s where she and her colleague, Meghan Largent, figure in.

“Sometimes landowners don’t even know this is happening,” Brinton said, adding that she doesn’t need a “threshold of landowners” to make a case. Even one will do. “We feel very confident we will be successful.”