Mt. Rainier Scenic Railroad bridge destroyed by fire

PACKWOOD, Wash. — Wednesday night was a night of celebration for the Mt. Rainier Scenic Railroad. This week, they had just completed the purchase of the rail lines they had been previously leasing from Tacoma Rail. It’s the latest achievement for the crew of 12 full-time employees that reopened the railroad in 2023. Then the calls came in. A fire on a bridge nearby.

“We started getting messages on our phones and hadn’t confirmed the railroad was on fire, but we were a little suspicious,” said Bethan Maher, the executive director of the Western Forest Industries Museum, which operates the Railroad.

As the last light of dusk faded away, Maher and some of her colleagues confirmed what they had feared—a 128-foot trestle bridge was up in flames, powered by the flammable creosote that coated the wooden beams.

“It’s safe to say it was shocking and is still shocking,” Maher said, “I spent most of the day onsite yesterday watching it burn.”

The bridge isn’t apart of the North and South routes that close to 80,000 people had ridden on in the last 18 months. But the near-capacity crowds over the last summer brought the bridge into a plan to build out more routes to bring more people to the scenic views of the westside of Mount Rainier.

“It’s been years of work. We’re a very small non-profit with a relatively small bank account and a whole lot of volunteers who give a ton of time and energy,” Maher said.

The locomotives and train cars they have all are around a century old, some salvaged, some bought, some brought in from collections, some found abandoned in the woods around Rainier. The infrastructure that old comes with its challenges, but the bridge itself was far from the list of concerns. It had been rebuilt 20 years earlier with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

“In terms of railroads, it’s in mint condition,” Maher said.

Maher and her team watched as the bridge collapsed, thankfully inwards on itself, limiting the smoldering wood’s spread. Washington’s Department of Natural Resources says it is human-caused, given that no natural sparks like lightning were detected in the area near there.

“We had investigators on the ground yesterday. That process will wind its way through its course, and hopefully we’ll have some sort of more exact findings sooner, rather than later,” Thomas Kyle-Milward, the wildfire communications manager for DNR.

It comes on the heels of some suspicious happenings at the railroad, like someone threatening to blow up one of the locomotives at the museum portion of its property.

“Do we know that it is related to that situation? We do not,” Maher said.

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The threat was over the railroad’s history of poor labor standards and practices, treatment of Asian American workers, and environmental damage. An irony that strikes Maher because it’s exactly that kind of history she’s hoping to share with people who ride on trains and visit the future museum that’s set in a log camp that was the setting of those conditions.

“I’m passionate about telling the stories of the folks that lived along the railroad and worked on the railroad. Not all the history associated with railroads is pretty and neat, but it’s real, and that’s a story that deserves to be told,” Maher said.

The museum, future routes, and more trains, Maher still sees in the railroad’s future, albeit on a longer time frame than what she had been planning on. In the meantime, the North and South routes are still available for trips, as well as other events they host in Elbe. She says buying tickets for those, and supporting their GoFundMe will help with the mitigation, the planning, and the engineering of a replacement bridge that she suspects will cost tens of millions of dollars.

“The future was very bright. I hope it still is,” Maher said.

A GoFundMe to benefit the railroad and help with rebuilding efforts has been set up.

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