Ron's right, CFNR was by all accounts glad to get rid of the NWP west of Lombard, even if their leaving was not necessarily by choice. I once heard what percentage of their MOW budget that line ate up, I've long since forgotten but it was a good percentage, and they had to make some major repairs after a couple serious winters during the time they ran it, and then had a long expensive railroad with minimal traffic to support it as it quite often took North Coast Railroad substantially longer than CFNR to get its line north of Willits reopened after a couple of the bigger storm events. I don't know what kind of bidding process NCRA had, but my memory is that Rail-Ways had some sort of involvement with the property before the FRA emergency order closing the line in late November 1998, and they were definitely the ones that slowly did the work to bring the extreme southern end of the NWP back into operation by early 2001, only to have that too end when NCRA cancelled their contract. Way too many long sentences in this post, but I don't feel like going back to revise them at the moment.

Jeff Moore
Elko, NV