To take away the trains, says Hanshew, would be to take Corcoran “back to the Stone Age.” In a City Hall conference room, a framed portrait of the new depot hangs on the wall. Mayor Larry Hanshew believes that passenger rail is central to his town’s participation in the modern world. Now, the daily Amtrak service and the new train depot are among Corcoran’s emblems of pride and progress. Four trains a day left from Corcoran, carrying the region’s agricultural produce beyond the Valley. The rail junction grew into a shipping center, with a freight loading dock and a two-story station building that offered shelter from the hot Central Valley sun. Whitley purchased the property known as “Corcoran Junction” and began the work of preparing the fertile land around Tulare Lake for large-scale farming. Eight years later, following the construction of a branch line toward Visalia, developer H.J. The Santa Fe Railroad laid north-south tracks here in 1898. Like many towns of the American West, Corcoran grew out of the national railway system. And former prisoners, released from the city’s two state penitentiaries, receive a one-way ticket to their county of origin. Students leave in the morning for two nearby community colleges and complete schoolwork on the trip home. Seniors ride north to Hanford and return laden with shopping bags. Hoggard remembers one in particular, a woman who delivered a $2 million grant to the city.įrom her desk abutting the depot, Chamber member relations officer Lisa Shaw watches the flow of passengers through the parking lot. State officials occasionally make the half-day commute to Corcoran from Sacramento on the train. Twelve Amtrak passenger trains pull up outside the depot each day, six northbound and six southbound. The Chamber shares its western wall with Corcoran’s train depot, a tidy Spanish-style building constructed in 1999 to replace a century-old Santa Fe Railroad shipping facility. One fat binder, balanced precariously atop the pile, reads “Board Minutes.”
Fresno high speed rail route movie#
In the summer, the Chamber sponsors an outdoor movie series and an ice cream contest. The Christmas Celebration follows the Cotton Festival, and after the Christmas Celebration, in January, comes the Annual Banquet. Three glossy spines bear the label “Cotton Festival” and a date, the typeset shifting subtly each October. In the offices of the Corcoran Chamber of Commerce, a two-tier bookshelf holds a stack of white plastic binders. I could have been in Corcoran in less than 90 minutes. I could have slept, or read, or checked my email, as the train’s high-tech signaling system navigated along the tracks through the fog. But if California’s vision for high-speed rail had been a reality on that January morning, I could have boarded a train in Palo Alto and traveled to Corcoran at up to twice my car’s top speed. The trip from Corcoran to the Bay Area on Amtrak passenger rail takes six hours.
When it rolls in thick, he says, some residents try to avoid the roads by taking a train from the small station in Corcoran’s downtown, north and west to San Francisco or south toward Bakersfield and Los Angeles. In 2007, an 86-vehicle pileup killed two motorists on nearby Highway 99, and two more died in a tangle of 74 cars on the same road several years earlier.Ĭorcoran city manager Ron Hoggard warned me about the fog. Visibility at the time of the crash was 300 feet. Less than 24 hours after my arrival in Corcoran, seven cars traveling along Interstate 5 collided in the fog. Sinking into a vast fissure between the coastal mountains and the rugged Sierra Nevada, it blankets the state’s wide highways and draws strings of curses from harried drivers. Fog is a hallmark of fall and winter in the California Central Valley.
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