I have a couple responses and answers....

First off, both the Mt. Shasta City to McCloud trackage AND the remaining trackage west from Lookout Junction are being readied for car storage at this moment. BNSF retained about the first five and a half miles west of Lookout Junction as industrial trackage when they abandoned the Hambone to Lookout line, and after about fifteen years of letting it sit idle BNSF either has, will have shortly, or just had a tie gang working on that line so they can store cars on it. Meanwhile, people from the Mike Williams Group/Midwest Pacific Rail Net & Logistics companies are working in McCloud, they have been making repairs to locomotive #38 and consolidating all of the various scrap piles around the shop into a single pile behind the building. Yet to come is the track crew, which will have a lot of brush removal and other repairs to make.

And the line west from Lookout wasn't quite technically always GN and successors. The story's a long one but the short version is that in 1928 the Red River Lumber Company sold the harvesting rights to the 82,000 acre White Horse Tract to the McCloud River Lumber Company. Within a couple weeks of that deal being finalized GN struck two deals with the McCloud River Lumber Company, one in which it agreed to lease to the lumber company all track materials needed to build the lumber company mainline from the eastern end of the McCloud River Railroad east to the proposed GN alignment, and the second a 10-year option to purchase said main line. The lumber company built the line from Hambone to Lookout between 1928 and 1930. GN bought the Lookout to White Horse section in the fall of 1930 and then the White Horse to Hambone part in 1931. Also worth noting GN was operating in the sale transactions as agent for Western Pacific, as the WP was to jointly own the branch with GN. WP gave up on that idea in 1932 and sold its half interest in the branch to the GN in exchange for a refund of the monies it had spent and trackage rights over the GN from Bieber through Lookout to Hambone, which it never used.

Lastly, McCloud Railway conveyed the right-of-way for their railroad east of the Pilgrim Creek Road crossing three miles east of town to the Great Shasta Rail Trail, now operated b the Shasta Land Trust. The trail is presently open from Pilgrim Creek Road east through Bartle to Hambone and then from the south end of the Lake Britton Bridge into Burney. They are working on the middle piece, from Lake Britton to Bartle, which requires some environmental remediation work along with stabilization work on the bridges at Lake Britton and other safety enhancements at the Highway 89 grade crossing out of Bartle. Last time I was through- I think October 2016- rails were indeed still in the pavement at the Highway 89 crossing at Arkrite.

Lastly, there is plenty of room in McCloud and on the old mainline out through the run-around to the end of track to store a lot of cars without blocking the main line, so yes, some sort of tourist operations might be feasible. In addition to locomotives any potential operator would need to completely rebuild the few passenger cars left in McCloud or bring some in from elsewhere. One major problem is that the tracks are gone from the old depot site downtown, they've been pulled from there to above the Columbero Street crossing. They'd have to figure out a new loading/boarding area somewhere else if excursion trains ever resume.

Jeff Moore
Elko, NV