Photos: Dezmond Remington.

PREVIOUSLY:

###

They’ve been there so long that they’ve kind of just blended into the legend and lore of the Eureka waterfront, but those zombie locomotives stranded on the Balloon Track for the last quarter-century are finally moving out, nearly 10 years after they were officially declared a public nuisance.

Tim Callison, project manager for Security National — the company that owns the Balloon Track — sounded plenty relieved on the phone today. 

“They figure it should take ‘em about a week to get everything out,” he said.

Callison said that the locomotives’ owner — a Matt Monson, out of Turlock — was saving one of them, which has some historic value. They’re strapping it on to some sort of big rig and trucking it back down someplace near Stockton. The rest of the engines are being scrapped on-site with heavy machinery.

Monson last spoke to the Outpost in 2016, when he promised action on the engines. He wrote:

I am in the slow process of moving them , this is a big and costly undertaking and takes time. Currently I am waiting for the moving equipment to be modified to move these …  I am looking forward to getting these engines out of there and put this whole night mare behind me … matt

This was after Monson made an abortive attempt to get the trains out of here nearly a decade ago.

Callison said that the dysfunctional state of the railroad contributed to the stalemate over getting the giant, ungainly machines out of here. No one could just roll ‘em out to greener pastures.

The Balloon Track is a former spur line of the Northwestern Pacific Railroad, which ran between the Bay Area and Humboldt until 1998, when the storm-wracked line could finally bear no more traffic. The engines have been stranded on the site for at least that long.

The North Coast Railroad Authority, the public agency that managed the battered line, was finally dissolved in 2021 and its assets handed over to the new Great Redwood Trail Agency.