Dreaming of rails

What Gunnar Henrioulle remembers most about his boyhood in Sacramento is rails. Trains and trolleys and mile upon mile of iron rail.

As a very small boy, living on X Street in the 1940s, he remembers trains that ran all the time, right down the middle of his street. He remembers the open hopper cars of the Sacramento Northern Line—now long gone—coasting past his front door, piled high with twisted hunks of metal, adorned with strange insignia. He remembers asking his mother what they were.

“German airplanes,” she replied, saying nothing more. It would be years before Gunnar understood the war, that the trains were taking the enemy craft to the aluminum smelter somewhere east.

Most of all, Henrioulle remembers riding the streetcars, everywhere. As a 4-year-old boy, he would often take the P Street line to visit his aunt. He remembers being scolded by the streetcar operator for playing with the sliding door that separated the inner compartment from the driver’s seat.

Through the years, up until the 1970s, he watched Sacramento’s glorious network of railroads shrink as the reign of the rubber wheel began and the rails rusted. Much of the evidence of Sacramento’s rail heritage goes overlooked today. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of tons of iron rail still embedded in the city streets, and much of it is left over from the old electric streetcar system.

In 1947, the city transit operating company, Nationwide City Lines, an affiliate of General Motors Company, retired the trolleys to replace them with diesel buses. It wasn’t until 1986 that urban rail came back, in a limited fashion, with the introduction of Light Rail. But a true streetcar system was never seen again.

Gunnar Henrioulle eventually grew up and moved to South Lake Tahoe to raise his own family. Now, in his 50s and retired, Henrioulle has moved back to Sacramento, and he’s brought with him a plan to restore the streetcar system of his youth.

So far he’s sunk about $125,000 of his own money, and countless hours, into the project. He purchased 18 vintage streetcars a while back at an auction held by the city of San Francisco, and he’s now shopping his idea around to business and community leaders in Sacramento and West Sacramento.

So far, his nostalgia, enthusiasm and life savings have made but a small down-payment on his dream. “I’m cautiously optimistic,” said Henrioulle. “I’m walking in with my hat in my hand. But I am confident it can be done.”

He believes urban rail would be a big boost to downtown Sacramento, which is struggling to cope with the multiple challenges of traffic and parking congestion, lax public transit ridership and an ongoing effort to revitalize the central city.

As the city looks to redevelop big chunks of downtown, adding more housing and shopping, Henrioulle said now is the time to start thinking about a downtown streetcar system to make it more appealing to live, work and shop downtown.

A handful of cities across the country have latched on to such historic or “heritage” rail lines, to supplement their larger transit systems and to enhance their own redevelopment efforts.

Henrioulle proposes a streetcar system that would be phased in, focusing first on a downtown loop that would serve the Amtrak Depot on I Street, run as far as R Street and then run along the Sacramento River, eventually crossing the Tower Bridge to do another smaller loop in West Sacramento.

He estimates that just the beginning system would cost no more than $15 million, perhaps as little as $5 million to lay the track and get the system running. One advantage of streetcars, said Henrioulle, is that they are relatively cheap, usually less per mile than light-rail extensions.

But more important, people actually like to ride streetcars. “It’s hard to quantify,” said Henrioulle. “The biggest thing about it is the ambience. There’s a sense of place that comes with being on a streetcar, and seeing streetcars in the street.”

Anecdotally, at least, many transportation experts seem to agree that people are much more likely to get on a streetcar than they are a bus.

“For some reason people, and Americans in particular, shy away from buses. People are just more inclined to use rail,” said Greg Taylor, a Sacramento architect and urban planner.

Taylor is intrigued by Henrioulle’s proposal, because he says Sacramento seems to be having a sort of identity crisis as it grows up: “Sacramento seems to forget its own history. This city really needs to connect more with its rail heritage.”

Henrioulle said he’s had little luck getting interest from the regional transit authority. He said the RT board members have told him they weren’t interested because a streetcar project would dilute efforts already underway to expand the light-rail system to downtown Folsom, the airport and south of Meadowview.

“The basic rejoinder has been, ‘Come back in 10 years,’ ” said Henrioulle.

Mike Wiley, director of customer services for Regional Transit, said he wasn’t familiar with Henrioulle’s proposal, but said that RT and the city have studied a possible streetcar system downtown, using vintage streetcars from the 1910s and ’20s. The study showed such a system was feasible.

“But it hasn’t been made a top priority,” Wiley said. “There’s nothing definitive on the drawing board right now.”

It should be noted that Henrioulle is hardly the only advocate for streetcars in Sacramento. In fact, he’s a bit of a newcomer.

The Friends of Light Rail, a rail organization that began about 15 years ago, has been working on its own plan to bring back streetcars, albeit in a somewhat more modest fashion. The group, in conjunction with Regional Transit, on special occasions dusts off the Number 35 car from Sacramento’s old trolley system to run it on K Street Mall. The group plans to begin raising funds this summer to restore the four vintage streetcars it has acquired. But a working system, said Friends of Light Rail director Seann Rooney, is still years away.

“In terms of the cash needed, and the political support, it’s going to take a lot of buy-in from a lot of different players,” said Rooney.

Is Henrioulle headed for a turf war with the established, politically connected Friends? Rooney said competition isn’t an issue: “We’re going to need a lot of friends to get something up and running. Gunnar does a really good job of advocating for rail. I really admire his enthusiasm.”

While the abandoned rail in Sacramento city streets is so much junk, the rail corridors themselves are quite valuable for historic reasons, and the federal government has pots of money set aside for restoring old rail corridors.

Take R Street, for example, a mostly run-down stretch of potholes, rails and warehouses. The street is actually the birthplace of the California Railroad. In 1855, the R Street line was completed, running from the Sacramento River east to Folsom. It was the first railroad ever built in California, long before the transcontinental line was ever built.

The R Street corridor is now a major redevelopment opportunity for the city. Henrioulle thinks a trolley system on R Street would bring in federal grant money “when we tell them we want to restore part of the first railroad in California.”

Henrioulle has also generated some interest by the business community. David Butler, vice president of the Sacramento Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, supports him in principle.

“I’m fascinated by it. I think it could be a signature project for downtown Sacramento,” said Butler, noting that a trolley system would give downtown a more historic feel, which would appeal to tourists as well as those thinking about moving to the central city.

He conceded that getting the project past the talking stage is a long way off, but said Henrioulle is off to a good start. “I’ve been talking to Gunnar about this for years. He is certainly passionate about this, which I think is very laudable.”

For his part, Henrioulle remains confident, hat in hand.

“Write this down. In five years, I am going to ride a trolley across the Tower Bridge.”