As with most things, there wasn't one single factor.

No question that the Great Recession hurt the operation deeply. According to figures published around that time, the dinner train hauled a fairly steady 15,000 people or so a year through the early to middle 2000s. Ridership fell off a cliff as the Recession took hold, down to 8,000 in 2008 and 6,500 or so in 2009.

The loss of the freight business also was a blow to the dinner train. Granted, the railroad was averaging a half million dollar loss a year on the freight business, but it at least provided some revenue stream to help pay for track maintenance, fuel, and other operational costs, and perhaps more importantly kept the railroad open year round, after the freights ended the dinner train typically shut down from January through usually March or into April, which contributed to ridership declines. At a public hearing during the initial phases of permitting for the giant water bottling plant Nestle was going to build on the old McCloud sawmill site Jeff Forbis testified that the passenger business alone was not capable of sustaining the remaining railroad, which is why he was lobbying hard for the plant and talking to everyone in Nestle he could find about establishing freight service. Had that plant been built it probably would not have used rail service; for example, in the Environmental Impact Report Nestle and the McCloud Community Services District prepared for the plant they only mentioned rail once in their proposed action, specifically as one possible method for shipping out materials from the old sawmill structures as they were demolished. In response to the McCloud Railway's efforts they did analyze an alternative consisting of two options for using rail service out of McCloud, under one option the finished product would be loaded into truck trailers on flatcars for delivery to an intermodal ramp in Mt. Shasta City, and in the other option the bottled water would be loaded into boxcars for deliver to a railcar to truck reload in Mt. Shasta City. In either case trucks would move product beyond Mt. Shasta City.

Lastly, it also was true that Jeff Forbis was looking to retire, but that factor really was a distant afterthought to the economic realities. The last dinner train ran in January 2010, the McCloud Railway went into a state of suspended animation after that, and then Jeff sold the companies and operating assets to Mike Williams in 2011.

As for the dinner train cars, only one has (yet) been scrapped. There were a total of seven heavyweight paired window passenger coaches, four converted to dining cars, two to dancing cars, and one to the McCloud depot, gift shop, and ticket booth; of those the four dining cars and one of the dancing cars are presently in St. Maries, Idaho, sent there around 2012 for potential use on a dinner train operation on the Williams owned St. Maries River Railroad that never got started, while the depot car has been moved onto the grounds of the former McCloud hospital for display and the second dancing car is still on the property, up behind the shop at last report. There was also a former Milwaukee Road lightweight coach that housed the generator providing house power to the train, along with a small on board gift shop and a lounge area, it sat at the old depot site for years until moved in 2016 up to the bottom end of the yard, where it still sits. The last car used on the train was a former WP 50-foot flatcar, the railroad scrapped it around 2011 or so.

Jeff Moore
Elko, NV
www.mccloudriverrailroad.com