Petaluma knocked my socks off. Guess I'll have to check out Windsor.
Downtown Petaluma, April 25th, 2025
By St. John Barned-Smith, Reporter May 31, 2025 - San Francisco Chronicle
After 67 years, a train rolled out of the city of Windsor on Saturday, with 80 souls aboard.
It was the Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit District’s latest expansion of a transit route that snakes from Larkspur in Marin County to Healdsburg and Cloverdale in Sonoma County.
The train system sits on refurbished tracks of the Northwestern Pacific Railroad, which last carried passengers in 1958. State lawmakers created the SMART district in 2002, but the rail service did not start carrying passengers along a 43-mile section of rail until 2017 — but that didn’t include the route’s three northernmost stations in Windsor, Healdsburg and Cloverdale.
In the years since, the district has been working to extend service north, SMART spokesperson Julia Gonzalez said.
“It’s taken years to secure funding to complete this northern section,” Gonzalez said. “That’s what made today particularly meaningful — the opening of the first stations of the northern extension.”
The SMART district’s rail service involved refurbishing the old tracks once used by the Northwestern Pacific Railway’s freight trains and replacing wood ties with concrete ones, which allowed trains to run up to 80 mph. SMART also had to rebuild and renovate former station buildings in Petaluma, Healdsburg and Windsor, replace a century-old bridge with a newer one, and obtain federal authorization to run trains on the moribund tracks.
Residents voted to fund the railway’s construction in 2008. The district completed a 43-mile route between Northern Santa Rosa and downtown San Rafael in mid-2017 and extended service to Larkspur in late 2019.
District officials say they hope to open Healdsburg’s station in 2028 and later extend service to Cloverdale, a small town near the Sonoma-Mendocino counties’ border. The agency has no estimated timeline for a Cloverdale station to open.
Enthusiasm ‘sky high’ as Sonoma-Marin rail service expands northward
Greg