The Rotary Club of Kirkland and the club’s partners have completed several historically significant projects at the midpoint of the Cross Kirkland Corridor, site of the former Northern Pacific Railway station.  The centerpiece is a Picnic Pavilion with picnic tables and illustrated signage describing the railroad’s 100-year-plus history in Kirkland.
 
If you were an entrepreneur in the late 1800’s, and you lived on the Eastside, you might have been involved in Leigh Hunt’s plans to build a steel mill and a rail link to serve it.  What is now Kirkland was to be an ambitious steel mill complex and a company town, headed by British steel entrepreneur Peter Kirk, Kirkland’s namesake. Around the 1890’s Hunt and others formed the Lake Washington Belt Line Company to build a rail line from the Longacres race track area north.  Other crews began building south from the Woodinville area.  Neither end was completed. The northern end stopped just south of today’s junction of Slater Street South and Kirkland Avenue. The southern portion ended near Renton.
 
Hunt’s Lake Washington Belt Line completed grading, began laying track, and built a two-story passenger and freight depot near the intersection of NE 87th Street and 116th Avenue NE (now I-405’s NE 85th Street interchange).  Kirkland was a boom town, and you can just imagine feeling the low rumble of great iron wheels and the long, wailing sound of train whistles.  But by 1892, a depression leading to “The Panic of 1893” and other factors ended Hunt’s Eastside industrialization and belt line efforts.  Then the Northern Pacific Railway took over, relocating a completed rail line along today’s eastside rail corridor, where trains ran for more than 100 years.
 
Today, the Rotary Club of Kirkland and the club’s partners have completed several historically significant projects at the midpoint of the Cross Kirkland Corridor, site of the former Northern Pacific Railway station.  The centerpiece is a Picnic Pavilion with picnic tables and illustrated signage describing the railroad’s 100-year-plus history in Kirkland.
 
The pavilion will feature old photographs of trains and the two structures that once stood on the site.  Picnic tables for the pavilion are being provided through a grant from Rotary District 5030.  The vintage railroad historical project includes a 60-foot section of original rails, an authentic railroad semaphore, a native plants area illustrating original vegetation along the Corridor, a railroad crossing sign, and split-rail fencing.
 
Two years ago the site was cleared by volunteers from the Rotary and other community groups.  Two large cottonwood trees were removed and native plants purchased thanks to funding from the Kirkland Parks Foundation.  Native plants and split rail fencing were installed with Rotary volunteer labor, with original rails and history signs thanks to funding provided by 4Culture, the cultural funding agency for King County.  Volunteer labor, grant money, and technical services contributed by Kirkland’s Apex Steel allowed the Rotary to complete installation of original rails.  An actual railroad semaphore, or train signal, was donated by former Kirkland attorney Robert Tjossem and installed recently by Rotary volunteers, again with assistance from Apex Steel.
 
In addition to the station development, in commemoration of Kirkland’s railroad history, Rotarians repainted the old Northern Pacific logos on the Kirkland Way overpass so that passersby have a greater sense of the role the railroad played in Kirkland’s evolution as a community.
 
For more information about the project, visit the Central Kirkland Corridor Rotary Central Station website at https://ckcrotarycentralstation.blogspot.com, or contact Rotary project lead Dave Aubry at daaubry@hotmail.com. Thank you to Kirklandhistory.org for the LWBL stories and setting.