Rails, trails and flails

A "time out" can be a good thing — for frazzled 4-year-olds or baffled football defenses. Slow down and take a breath. The principle works as well for the 42-mile Eastside rail corridor.

Plans that seemed so clear as recently as last week have been put on hold until the options and expenses are sorted out and better understood. At the moment, King County's financial role is murky at best. For now, everything is rolled back to basics. The Port of Seattle will buy the underused freight-rail line from BNSF Railway for something around $103 million. The corridor runs south of Woodinville to Renton, together with a spur to Redmond. A section north of Woodinville to Snohomish will continue to carry commercial freight.

The rail line is acquired for public use and holds great promise as a bicycle trail and commuter corridor. That exciting potential for dual use was endorsed last June by local officials, bicycle groups, environmentalists and transportation advocates.

Along the way, King County was negotiating land swaps and purchase agreements with the Port, and working hard to take advantage of an "extraordinary, once-in-a-lifetime investment," as described by County Executive Ron Sims.

For a while, the county talked about spending $40 million to develop a recreational trail. More recently, that changed to spending $44 million to buy a 13-mile section of the corridor. So, is the new working total more like $80 million? Council members could not tell, and balked until they had better information.

The county will keep an option to buy a stretch of the corridor, but earlier plans to turn over the King County International Airport — Boeing Field — and transfer land on Harbor Island to the Port are off the table.

Those pesky rails. Do they stay or go? Did the defeat of Proposition 1, the mondo transportation plan, stir a pulse in Sound Transit to look at the corridor for high-speed transit? All the dismissed questions are in play again.

One element must be unchanged: dual use. Save a rare, north-south route to move people in the future. Protecting transit options does not preclude recreational options.