San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Marin’s best transit system reached end of line in 1941
It was a dark and rainy night 80 years ago on Feb. 28, 1941. That was the night they scrapped the best transit system Marin County ever had.
The occasion was the last run of the Northwestern Pacific commuter rail line, which linked Fairfax, the Ross Valley, San Rafael and Mill Valley with San Francisco by way of a ferry connection from Sausalito. The ferries and trains were abandoned because people thought they were oldfashioned and obsolete. But as it turns out, the old transit system was faster, cleaner and more efficient than the buses that replaced them.
Even with a ferry connection, the Northwestern Pacific electric trains took commuters from the city to places such as San Rafael and Mill Valley faster than Golden Gate Transit buses do today.
For example, a trip by ferry and train from San Francisco to San Rafael by way of Greenbrae took 53 minutes back then. Now Golden Gate Transit’s rush hour Highway 101 service is scheduled to take an hour and 10 minutes for the same run.
The electric trains made the difference. Zipping along at 50 mph or so on their own private right of way, they could make the short run from Sausalito to Mill Valley in 15 minutes. They ran every half hour from 5:45 a.m. to 1:15 a.m. The modern buses run half as often and are twice as slow. “It was quite a service,” said Fred Codoni, a Marin County rail historian.
It all began in 1868, just after the Civil War, when a land development company bought the ferry steamer Princess and began service from San Francisco to Sausalito, then described as “unknown country.” Rail service to the inland towns began six years later, and the Marin commuter was born. The North Bay has always had an uneasy relationship with the outfits that provided transportation. The early trains, which were steampowered, noisy and slow, were regarded as oldfashioned, even then.
But just after the turn of the 20th century, two entrepreneurs, Eugene de Sabla and John Martin, took over the decrepit North Pacific Coast Railroad and modernized it. They ran power lines from the Sierra and built a complete commuter railroad powered by electricity. It had an innovative signal system that was the envy of the transit world.
By the Roaring Twenties, the railroad, now renamed the Northwestern Pacific, was booming. Its commute service trains ran to the Russian River, to the Sonoma Valley, and all the way to Eureka, through the heart of what boosters called the Redwood Empire.
“On a busy day, there would be 20,000 or 30,000 people pouring through the terminal in Sausalito,” Codoni said.
The railroad invested millions of dollars in new steel railcars, handsome new station buildings in San Rafael, Larkspur, Mill Valley and three other towns, and new ferryboats, including three sleek new automobile boats. The flagship of the fleet, the steamer Eureka, could carry 3,000 passengers at once and was the largest passenger ferry in the world.
“But then, three things happened: the Depression, the automobile and the Golden Gate Bridge,” Codoni said.
When the Roaring Twenties were really roaring, cars poured into Marin, then and now famous for its beauty, a perfect escape from the city. The ferries couldn’t handle all the business — on sunny Sundays and holidays, cars backed up bumper to bumper on Highway 101 all the way from Sausalito to Larkspur. Sometimes after waiting in line for hours, a driver in the family car would be told the last boat had left and the next boat was at dawn.
When the bridge opened in 1937, the commuters deserted in droves; financial losses mounted, and the state gave the Northwestern Pacific permission to abandon the system.
It was rainy and stormy on Friday, Feb. 28, the last day. “The bay was angry,” wrote the Sausalito News. “They say it was because they were to say farewell to the ferries that night.”
It was an epic farewell. The Northwestern Pacific Historical Society’s newsletter tells the story of Jack Farley, who got on the last roundtrip electric train at B Street Station in San Rafael.
“Everybody and his brother was there,” he said. “Anything went. There was dancing in the aisles, horns, music and booze.”
By the time they got to Sausalito, the train was 16 or 17 cars long. The passengers piled aboard the ferry Eureka for the last trip. “There was music, food and beer in the restaurant,” the San Anselmo paper reported. Another crowd came aboard in San Francisco, and on the way back, the boat rocked and rolled, nostalgia mixed with alcohol. The crowd decided to take souvenirs, including life jackets and anything not tied down. When they got to Sausalito, Farley said, every cop in Marin was on hand to reclaim the “souvenirs.” Farley and his friends boarded the final, final electric train. “I got home at 3 a.m.,” he said.
There is nothing much left of the railroad: a few pieces of track here and there, station buildings at Mill Valley, Larkspur and San Rafael. The ferryboat Eureka shifted to the Oakland ferry run and is now a floating exhibit at the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park.
Some people wonder what might have happened if the Marin system had survived another 10 months, until December 1941, when the attack on Pearl Harbor changed the world. Surely a transit system like that would never have been abandoned in wartime.
After the war, the rail system might have become the backbone of a bigtime transit operation and transformed Marin County the way BART transformed Contra Costa and Alameda counties.
“They always wanted to bring something like BART to Marin,” Codoni said. “Thank God that never happened.”