Wilburton Trestle: A 1904 Railroad Trestle Becomes a Trail

Drivers on Interstate 405 through Bellevue notice it: a tall wooden railroad trestle over a valley that used to be an extension of Lake Washington. Eastrail calls the Wilburton Trestle 1,000 feet long and 100 feet tall, the longest wooden trestle in the Pacific Northwest. Wikipedia gives 975 feet long and 102 feet high, and marks its own 'longest' claim as needing a citation. [1][2]

It was completed in 1904 on the Northern Pacific Railway's Lake Washington Belt Line, from Black River Junction, south of Seattle, to Woodinville. The trestle carried a single track of that branch line, which ran approximately 40 miles from Renton in the south to Snohomish in the north. Because its timber deteriorated, the trestle was rebuilt four separate times, in 1913, 1924, 1934 and 1943. In 1973 a road, the Lake Hills Connector, was cut through it, and a short section was replaced with concrete piers and steel deck girders. [2]

Regular passenger service ended on July 19, 1922, when the daily-except-Sunday trains stopped during a national railway strike and never came back. Casey Jones excursion trains crossed in the 1950s and 1960s, and the Spirit of Washington Dinner Train ran over it between Renton and Woodinville from May 1992 to July 31, 2007. Freight trains ran six days a week, including trains carrying Boeing's aircraft fuselages to its assembly plant in Renton. The last train over the trestle was one of those, a BNSF freight with Boeing 737 fuselages, on February 26, 2008. That May BNSF sold the line to the Port of Seattle, which later sold it to King County. [2]

One story about it is probably wrong. It is believed to be the trestle in the 1963 Elvis Presley film It Happened at the World's Fair, but Wikipedia says further evidence points to a trestle over the White River between Enumclaw and Buckley. Nor is it the Wilburton Tunnel, which carried the southbound lanes of I-405 under the railroad about a quarter mile south, until it was demolished on August 16, 2008, to widen the freeway. [2]

Now it is becoming a trail bridge on Eastrail, a 42-mile former railroad corridor being turned into a paved trail connecting South King County to Eastside cities and Snohomish County, with a spur to Redmond. Crews are installing a 20-foot-wide trail surface, railings and three viewing platforms on the 122-year-old trestle, replacing deteriorated wood and hardware, and reinforcing the pillars against earthquakes. The $43.5 million project draws on $27 million from the King County Parks Levy, $9 million from the state, $5 million from Amazon, $2 million from the City of Bellevue and $500,000 from Kaiser Permanente Washington. The tentative opening date is summer 2027, with views of the Bellevue skyline and a connection to Sound Transit's Wilburton Station. [1]