Every day on my way to work, I ride my bike past these old railroad tracks on the western shore of Lake Union. They were used pretty heavily in the early and mid 1900s, but today they are abandoned and forgotten.
I had a hard time finding information about what this section of track was used for when searching on the web, but as far as I can tell the spur was build in about 1911 and was used until the mid 1990s. It was one of the spurs of the Northern Pacific Railway, which seems to have a colorful history in Seattle in the late 1800s and early 1900s. One of the few photos I could find is from 1915, when this stretch of rail was a nice trestle just off shore of Lake Union. Today the land has filled in and is butted right up against it, but there is still a bit of a dropoff between the ties.
Somebody else has done more sleuthing than I have and has some more information on the tracks at http://lakeunionwatershed.com/?p=377. I also ran across a higher view of the area from 1916. This section of track is just out of view on the curve, very close to where the road bridge crosses the rails.
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