SMART Cloverdale???
Author: Donaghy
Date: 08-11-2018 - 16:00
SMART is supposed to eventually build their railroad to Cloverdale. Milepost 85. Like 5000 or 10000 people live up there. It's a small town surrounded by the kinds of hills that mother nature tragically said last fall in Santa Rosa should not be built in. Next stop south of Cloverdale is Healdsburg, a little bit bigger, slightly less hemmed in by hills but not by much. A lot of the land is rich vineyard land.
I wonder if SMART or its tax base will eventually question the wisdom of running 17 miles of track north of Healdsburg so the hamlet of Cloverdale can commute by train if they feel like it (there is not much traffic up there)?
Right now SMART says they cannot afford to pay enough money to attract the labor necessary to fully staff their trains. And they blame this for the fact that they aren't fulfilling their obligation to provide half hour trains during commute period.
To me it seems like building to Cloverdale is dumb not SMART when they can't run the railroad they have already built at full throttle. How is adding 17 miles of stationless track to a little village going to help improve the situation? The twenty fares picked up in Cloverdale will cover a small fraction of one of the conductor's pay for getting up there.
I think this is a classic case of train for the sake of a train without really thinking it through.