From outside the box

There are monsters that roam the valley. They are thousand of times larger than any dinosaur that ever existed. You can hear them roar from miles away. They can be over a mile long. Once they start moving, they cannot be stopped. They destroy anything that gets in their path. And their path goes right thru the middle of our town and our college campus.

I'm sure there was a time when communities were built around the path of trains because they delivered everything a community needed to grow and to sustain itself. Then trucks came along and trains were no longer needed for local deliveries. Communities continued to grow around the established train routes until eventually the trains were all going right thru the middle of cities and in most cases, not even stopping because there was no reason to.

I grew up in southern California. As a child I can remember stopping for the trains every time we went into town. Then in the fifties and sixties they did something down there to fix this problem. Now try to follow along with this concept because I know that as a Chicoan this will sound foreign to you. What they did was to elevate the roads over the tracks so that the cars no longer had to stop for the trains. You know, that bridge thing, like we did here where road meets freeway. These "bridges" also had a positive impact for the vertically challenged, soberly impaired college student and local bums. They quit getting creamed as often by the trains because they could use the "bridges" too. When your walking high up over the tracks, it's harder to mistake them for a soft mattress.

I have a better idea to deal with the tracks in Chico than to build bridges. Move them. We don't need them running thru town anymore. Move them a few miles west where they will be in the green zone and no longer be a nuisance in town. This will serve two purposes. Not only do we free up the flow of traffic without having to build expensive bridges, but we can use the existing train route along highway 32 to build another highway 32. We could turn the existing highway 32 into a two way street from 9th St. going west out to Muir or even Meridian. Where the tracks are along this stretch would be a one way street going west and where the existing Walnut St. and Nord Ave. is would be a one way street going east. Then we have dealt with a major congested corridor without ever having to widen the existing streets and taking out real estate to do so. The train tracks could head west off of Midway, maybe below Durham, staying in the green zone, heading west until they passed Meridian Road at which point they would connect up with the existing tracks, bypassing Chico altogether.

Now for all of you romantics that would miss the sound of the train whistle echoing thru the valley as the nightbird sings his lonely lullaby beneath a canopy of glittering stars in the midnight sky, maybe we could put loud speakers where the tracks are now, attached to a series of microphones that would pick up the train whistle as it blows in the FAR OFF distant farmlands to the west?

But seriously, there are three reasons these ideas will never happen. Red tape, money, and the fact that we are in northern California. Northern California....this is the place that when I moved here in 1972 the big talk was that we were two or three years away from having a freeway built between Chico and Sacramento. Then three years later we were five years away from the freeway being built. By the eighties, the freeway became a four lane highway. Fifteen years later there was one passing lane built somewhere on highway 70. Now, there's not even talk anymore. So as our highways and streets get more congested and as we watch our tax dollars flowing south, like our water, I guess the best thing we can do at this point is to add more stop lights along our highways in a vain attempt to make them safer, because they're never gonna be freeways, and start an awareness campaign to teach the vertically challenged and soberly impaired students and bums the difference between a mattress and a railroad track.