Rails to Trails

The whole concept of rails to trails seems nice doesn't it? You turn some dirty old railroad tracks into an utopian clean walking/bike path. After all, a nice quiet path is so green and railroads are a vestige of the gilded age, when we looked the other way so a few men could rape the earth for their profits. But trails from rails isn't 100% rosy, after all, the rails would not have been pulled up it the line was still profitable. So the sad piece is that our consumer economy has rendered the twice weekly local freight obsolete. After all local freight works better when there is local production. Again we tie into the death of the boxcar and the rise container trains full of plastic crap from China. Now is it greener to have the Chinese make plastic crap and put it on a ship and it sail across the Pacific, or have it built locally and then shipped by diesel electric train across the land. I don't know. But you wonder if we will ever turn trail into rail...
Tonight a picture from the Preston-Snoqualmie Trail, once a upon a time, the Seattle, Northshore and Eastern and then later the Northern Pacific.