I've been reading with interest the various R.I.P. NCRA threads below. The Novato legal action may be somewhat frivolous, but it still has the potential to tie things up for years to come.

That being said, I have seen no references so far to the on-going proceedings in front of the Surface Transportation Board reguarding this issue. The new operator filed a Notice of Exemption to change operators with the STB, with two parties filing protests of sort. One was a developer who claimed to have been deeded part of the NWP right-of-way years ago, and the other was the California Western (whatever their current name is). The Cal Western challenged the proceedings with a claim that the exemption provided false and misleading information, i.e. that the railroad had not been in actual operation for a substantial period of time and the sudden re-birth of the railroad would push traffic increases past the point that would trigger environmental reviews. Cal Western also stated that NCRA had failed to maintain the tracks in the Willits area that CWR has trackage rights over to reach the Willits depot, and CWR wanted NCRA to be forced to protect CWR's trackage rights agreement and to compensate CWR for track maintenance that they performed to NCRA's tracks over the past several years. The STB denied both protests, as NCRA showed how the increase of train traffic from nothing to the 1-2 daily trains they are talking about operating did not rise to the level of a traffic increase that would trigger Federal environmental impact reviews and the STB found that the other issues raised by CWR and the developer would best be handled by the court system.

Today an environmental group called Friends of the Eel River filed a request to revoke the operating exemption. In their filing they raised a lot of the same issues that the Cal Western did. It appears that this should be a slam dunk case for the NCRA/NWP, as the issues presented have already been raised and dealt with. However, the interesting part is that the Friends included two attachments with their filing, the first a copy of the 1998 emergency order that closed the NWP and the second is the initial CEQA screening worksheet completed by NCRA to determine what issues related to resuming their rail service would be analyzed in an Environmental Impact Report. This is the screening worksheet that a lot of people got excited about a few weeks ago. I had not seen it before, and it makes for some very, very interesting reading.

To see all of this go to the STB website (http://www.stb.dot.gov) and look for docket number FD_35073_0 in the Filings and Decisions sections.

Jeff Moore
Elko, NV