No Extra Dinner Train Payment: Closed Operation Won’t Have to Shell Out for Contract, Tacoma Rail Says
By John Gillie, The News Tribune, Tacoma, Wash.
Oct. 31–Tacoma Rail says it won’t seek extra payments from a failed dinner train operation that used municipally owned tracks, even though the operators failed to give a 30-day notice required by their written agreement.
Tacoma Rail superintendent Paula Henry said Tuesday that although she was surprised by the abrupt shutdown Monday of the Spirit of Washington Dinner Train’s operations, the city-owned railroad won’t try to collect charges beyond those the dinner train owes for recent operations. The city and the dinner train had agreed on a 10-month trial, beginning in early August.
“I don’t think we’ll go there,” she said.
Tacoma Rail learned of the dinner train’s demise in a 5:22 p.m. Monday e-mail from dinner train owner Eric Temple to Tacoma Rail assistant superintendent Alan Hardy.
That e-mail message was brief: “I am pretty sure you guys have heard, but just in case,” Temple wrote, and included a Web site link to a Seattle television station’s news story about the dinner train’s operations halt.
Henry learned of the dinner train operation’s decision when she arrived at Sea-Tac Airport about 9:30 p.m. from a vacation in Mexico. Hardy called her with the news.
The railroad superintendent said that as recently as last week Tacoma Rail officials, dinner train executives and leaders from Sound Transit’s Sounder rail operation, which uses the same Freighthouse Square station as the dinner train, were meeting to talk about resolving operational problems.
The dinner train parked on tracks near Freighthouse Square between C and D streets on nights it had excursions scheduled. The train’s presence there was triggering a red signal for a late evening Sounder commuter train. That caused the Sounder to stop short of the station for six minutes while the route ahead was determined to be clear. Tacoma Rail, Sound Transit and the dinner train operators were near agreement on moving the signal to solve the problem, Henry said.
The city and dinner train operators had earlier this month planned how they intended to lobby for more money to upgrade Tacoma Rail’s tracks between Freighthouse Square and Ashford to allow the dinner train to travel more quickly.
A recent study for Tacoma Rail projected a need for an investment of $24.3 million to upgrade tracks, fix a bridge, build new passenger platforms and improve signals, to allow for a three-hour trip to the Paradise visitors center at Mount Rainier National Park.
The dinner train’s recent route fell considerably short of reaching the park because the track was not in good enough shape to allow higher-speed operations. It traveled from Tacoma to Lake Kapowsin before retracing its route. The route the dinner train followed was an old Milwaukee Road branch line that the city acquired from Weyerhaeuser Co. in the late ’90s.
The Spirit of Washington had moved to Tacoma in August after a 15-year run on a BNSF Railway branch stretching between Renton and Woodinville. The train was forced to move because plans to expand Interstate 405 would have severed the rail line south of Bellevue. Temple said costs were higher than he projected and ridership was lower, prompting his shutdown decision.
Henry said Tacoma Rail was helping the dinner train owners move the train’s passenger cars to Battle Ground, Clark County, via the BNSF and the dinner train’s locomotives to Yakima on that same railroad.
John Gillie: 253-597-8663
john.gillie@thenewstribune.com
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