Quote:
Originally Posted by wburg
Well, yeah, moving the depot ismeans a lot of time and money, but it probably wouldn't be more expensive than building a new station in its place. The whole reason why a new depot was built in the 1920s was threefold: to make use of land previously occupied by Lake Sutter/China Slough, to have a train station that was closer to the heart of downtown, and to physically separate freight trains from passenger trains. The freights were run on the old tangent alignment (and location of the 1890s era station), and the passenger yard was placed in the current location to parallel the new station.
In my mind, that might be the best possible alignment: run a tangent track so freights don't have to slow down, and passengers won't have to dodge freights on the platforms. However, the final deal which allowed the city to take control of the station included an agreement to relocate the tracks to the old freight tangent, and there are safety concerns about switches and diamonds (which could increase risk of derailment for trains operating at speed) so close to the I Street Bridge.
Part of the appeal of moving the station is that the city would then own two blocks of relatively vacant downtown land, which would be good places for tall towers, and the station's new orientation would be closer to the Railyards while still close to downtown. It would also allow CSRM to transfer equipment to the Shops without using their current method of temporarily laying a piece of track across the UP mainline to shuffle equipment across within a ten-minute window. So there are pluses and minuses in both directions...
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On balance, I think forcing the city to spend enormous sums of money to move the depot is wasteful. I may be wrong, but my understanding is that a major preservationist demand was that the building could only continue as a functioning station. There must have been alternatives - I would imagine all of them cheaper - that would have kept the building for a variety of uses while preserving the architectural heritage that didn’t involve this costly move.
I have to ask what the goal was - preserve a beautiful and integral part of Sacramento history - or force a big developer and city to give up a pound of flesh.
Now we are asking an architect to somehow tack on a new spectacular station to a relic that was probably undersized from the beginning - and certainly is now.