(click to enlarge photos)
Published in The Seattle Times on-line on August 8, 2024
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on August 11, 2024
Only forest remains where once stood a lofty, coal-train trestle
By Jean Sherrard
Hellish roads, we understand, often are paved with good intentions.
When column founder Paul Dorpat emailed me a list of “Easy Dozen” column topics nearly a decade ago, featuring this week’s spectacular “Then” photo, he certainly meant well. It would be child’s play to repeat, he insisted.
Taking up Dorpat’s challenge, we enlisted the aid of the Newcastle Historical Society. Turns out the path to the May Creek trestle was one less taken.
Wielding machetes and loppers, we bushwacked along the overgrown rail bed traversing the steep southern shoulder of May Valley between Renton and Newcastle east of I-405. We clambered
over decades of refuse — from ancient washing machines to rusted motorcycles and automobiles — tossed from above into the ravine, muscling toward the former trestle site.
A dizzying 150 feet below flowed May Creek, a Lake Washington tributary wandering a steep canyon floor that was scooped out 10,000 years ago by the receding Vashon Glacier.
Directly east lay vast coal deposits first mined in 1863. Transport from Newcastle took days, employing tramways, wagons and barges loaded and unloaded up to 11 times before reaching Elliott Bay coal bunkers. Most mining profits were devoured by the cost of portage.
But by the late 1870s, steam clouds of change filled the air.
Extending the audaciously named Seattle and Walla Walla Railroad (which never ran beyond King County) would let coal be loaded directly onto train cars from the Newcastle coal face, slicing transport to mere hours.
Gullies were filled, hills leveled and 18 narrow gauge timber trestles constructed. Spanning May Creek Valley was a trestle126 feet tall and 1,070 feet long. At the time, it was hailed the largest in the territory.
The venture soon paid off.
During its first year, exports of Newcastle coal substantially increased, enough to make the 21-mile-long S&WW the country’s most profitable railroad.
By 1897, a New York firm, the Pacific Coast Co, assumed ownership, replacing 20-year-old narrow gauge with more robust standard-gauge tracks.
Contemporary observers, however, still noted the unnerving sway of the trestle beneath coal-laden cars. It would “shake the nerves of the stoutest hearts when they see what is expected to uphold a train in motion,” reported one anxious journalist.
In 1937, the rickety trestle was dismantled, having outlived the shuttered coal mines by nearly a decade. Today the once-ubiquitous rails are absent from Newcastle. But not the ghosts of hard labor.
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Thanks for this article, Jean. I grew up stomping around what was left of the old coal mines and Newcastle. I don’t think I knew about this trestle. I had seen some equipment leftover and the blown-shut entrances to mines. There was a suburban legend that there was a coal train or coal car at the bottom of Lake Boren. I discovered the back of the Newcastle cemetery by accident, realizing that there were toppled headstones by my feet. Such an interesting place. I once had my hands on a list of miners that had died there, but I don’t know where to find that now.
what a great bit of history. One comment from a picky retired forester: the stump shown is likely to be 35 feet in circumference rather than diameter as shown by the person sitting on top.
Regarding the tree stump photo: it seems unlikely to have a diameter of 35 feet. The “largest western red cedar in the world” has a base trunk diameter of 19.5 feet. Judging by the relative size of the individuals standing to either side of the stump in the photo, I’d guess the diameter at 10 to 12 feet. Perhaps Peggy Price was actually trying to estimate the circumference?
As noted by many people, 35′ was the estimated circumference of the Red Cedar (diameter apx. 11′). However a cedar in a protected valley, with constant water and humidity and a trunk that size would have been 150′- 200′ tall. Imagine that in your back yard.
Kai Dalton has been researching the May Creek Logging Company and has a photo of a full train load of logs being pulled under this trestle! For several years their rails ran right up the valley, following the creek and cutting trees on both sides all the way up to and around the Coalfield area.
There is also an existing well maintained trail on the north side of May Creek. You can start at Lake Boren Park and hike the old Seattle & Walla Walla rail grade to the jumping off point where the big trestles would have started. An informative kiosk there on the north bank was built by Eagle Scouts from Newcastle Troop, whose members also had a big hand in constructing the trail.
Peggy and the Newcastle Trails group would like to extend the trail all the way to the Kennydale School, but that would require a long bridge (suspension ?) over today’s floodplain. Renton Parks Likes the idea, but still needs to acquire a critical parcel next the the creek and obtain funding for the bridge and south bank construction. It would certainly be a gift to future generations and a ‘heritage connection’ to our past.