By golly you're both right.......if the Espee and Santa Fe hadn't joined on the project it probably wouldn't have happened. It was the market for the finished lumber rather than log hauling that was the incentive. By the 1930's the auto, highway improvements and the Depression cut deeply into passenger and much of the freight business. 1929 SP bought out Santa Fe's interest. Operation through the 1970's was just a reflection of the post World War II housing boom. After PL & LP finished off the clearcuts on private timberlands, that was it. It's been a favorite target to blame the creation of Redwood National Park for all the economic woes of the north end, but clear cutting of the Redwood Creek basin might have bought 3 or 4 more years in the 1970's. The result would have been the same, and probably a more precipitous end. Companies like Simpson and Georgia Pacific came in when the post war boom was ending in the late 1950's. People like Red Emerson and Sierra Pacific carved out a unique place in the timber industry.
Headwaters Forest may have covered 3 or 4 more years of Pacific Lumber's debt service, but the end would have been the same. When its gone, its gone.

Beyond the demise of our favorite railroad, the true tragedy here was ruin of one of the best managed timber operations in the West, Pacific Lumber Company. One of the true ironies of this history is the morphasis of Simpson Timber Company's redwood operations into Green Diamond Resource Company, Inc........not a bad thing. Their product arm, California Redwood Company (formerly Arcata Redwood Company) was the name of the Scottish Syndicate of the late 1870's early 1880's that tried to swindle redwood lands from the Feds using flawed homestead laws and was the subject of the 1952 film "The Big Trees" staring Kirk Douglas and Edgar Buchannan. That film is in the public domain and has some great railroad shots on the Hammond-Little River operation out of Crannell. Great shots of the Carlotta Hotel too.

OK........have at it.............
ARD

Ok.......have at it