For as long as most people in Willits can remember, the good stuff happened forty minutes west. If you wanted the cocktail car, you drove to Fort Bragg. If you wanted the steam engine and the redwood photo ops, you drove to Fort Bragg. The Willits depot on East Commercial Street was where you caught the train, not where the train's newest ideas started.
That pattern broke this year, and it broke in a specific and traceable way.
The Old Pattern, Reversed
Mendocino Railway's Presidential Class car, the plush lounge experience with two included cocktails and a first-class conductor, has run out of the Fort Bragg depot for years, with seats starting around $203.50 per person. Days of Steam, the summer run behind the historic Chiggen locomotive, launches from the same coastal depot every June through August. If you wanted the elevated version of the Skunk Train, the coast was the default answer.
This year, Mendocino Railway's own leadership said the plan was to flip that. CEO Robert Jason Pinoli described 2026 as a season built around Willits specifically, and General Manager Efstathios Pappas has said the steep, wild terrain on the Willits side of the line is his personal favorite stretch of track, more dramatic than the Fort Bragg approach. The three biggest new things the railroad rolled out this year all confirm it. None of them start on the coast.
What Launched From Willits This Year
The first was the Railcoaster, an electric-assist railbike route that left the Willits depot for the first time on May 16. It's a roughly 15-mile round trip that climbs through the 1,100-foot Summit Tunnel, crosses the highest point on the entire line at 1,740 feet, and drops into the Noyo River Canyon before stopping at a former mining camp called Crowley. A picnic lunch and a souvenir T-shirt come with the ticket, and the electric assist means riders aren't required to pedal the whole way, which matters on a route with that much elevation change.
Pappas has talked about why this side of the line got the treatment instead of the coast:
"Not to take anything away from the Fort Bragg side, but this is my personal favorite portion of the railroad. Look how steep, how lush, and how wild the countryside is on this side versus the Fort Bragg side."
That's not marketing language dressed up after the fact. It's the reasoning given before the Railcoaster launched, and it lines up with where the railroad kept investing all year.
The Car That Moved Overland
The second piece of evidence literally had to be trucked in. The Noyo, a mid-century cocktail lounge car built out of a former U.S. Army railcar, spent months being restored in the Fort Bragg roundhouse. In August, it left the coast for good, moved by highway to Willits, where it now runs several days a week and is available for private buyouts.
The design leans into a specific era. Mendocino Railway has said the car's look draws on industrial designers Otto Kuhler and Henry Dreyfuss, the same aesthetic language behind mid-century train styling from the 1940s and 1950s. It's a small detail, but it tells you the railroad didn't just relocate equipment. It relocated its flagship experience.
A Circus You Can Only Reach By Train
The clearest sign of where the railroad's attention is pointed this year is running right now, through September 27. Flynn Creek Circus, a Mendocino County company founded in Comptche in 2002, has set up a vintage big-top tent in a clearing deep in the Noyo River Canyon. There's no road in. The only way to see the show, called "The Cricket & the Wren," is to board a train from the Willits depot at 299 East Commercial Street.
Ticket tiers reflect how much the railroad is treating this as a flagship event rather than a novelty add-on.
| Tier | What's Included | Price Range |
|---|---|---|
| Big Top | Train ride, general tent seating | $137 |
| Mr. Moundshroud's Premium | Picnic meal, reserved bench behind ringmaster seats | Mid-range |
| The Noyo (21+) | Two cocktails, light bites, tableside seating at the ring | $322 |
Trains depart at 12:30 and 5:30 on show days, and the whole outing runs about four hours gate to gate. A few logistics are worth knowing if you haven't been paying attention to the calendar:
- Arrive 30 minutes before departure. Trains leave on time regardless.
- No dogs on this particular run, unlike most regular Skunk Train departures.
- The show goes on rain or shine, and concessions including beer and wine are sold at the tent.
- Residents of Mendocino, Lake, and Humboldt counties get a discount on select weekday performances.
The last train back down the canyon runs on September 27, after which the tent comes down and Flynn Creek Circus moves on to its next stop. Seventeen days, twenty-one shows, and every one of them starting from a depot that used to be considered the plain end of the line.
The Depot's Half-Mile Radius
None of this happened in isolation from the rest of downtown. The Willits depot sits close enough to walk to a handful of places that have become the natural bookends to a train ride, and locals have been quietly folding them into an evening out long before any of this year's announcements.
Northspur Brewing Company is the spot people mention first, close enough to the depot that a beer on the patio before or after a ride has become something of a routine. Shanachie Pub, known for live music, works as the after-dinner stop once a Highball Express run wraps up in the evening. For food, Taquería Bravo has become a go-to for a post-ride meal, and Brickhouse Coffee and the Whistle Stop Cafe cover the mornings, both within easy walking distance of the tracks.
None of these businesses are new. What's new is the reason more people are walking between them on a given weekend night, and that reason traces directly back to what the railroad decided to build in 2026.
What's Next
The Railcoaster runs Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays through the fall. Once the circus wraps up on September 27, the next scheduled event out of the Willits depot is the Pumpkin Express in October, a two-hour round trip billed as Northern California's only pumpkin patch train ride. It's a shorter, gentler outing than the Railcoaster or the circus run, a 45-minute ride each way to a redwood glade that gets dressed up as a pumpkin patch for the season, aimed more at families than at the crowd chasing cocktails in a mid-century lounge car.
Taken together, the season reads less like a list of new attractions and more like a decision. For most of the Skunk Train's modern history, the coast got the polish and Willits got the platform. This year the railroad's own leadership said out loud that the inland side of the line, the steeper, less photographed half, is where they wanted to put their money. The Railcoaster, the relocated Noyo car, and a circus tent that can only be reached by rail all point the same direction, and that direction is inland, toward a depot that a lot of Willits residents have walked past for years without expecting much to change.
If you live here, the practical version of all this is simple. The best new things the Skunk Train has done in years are starting a few blocks from downtown, not a forty-minute drive away. Northspur's patio, Shanachie's stage, and the walk between them are still exactly what they've always been. What changed is what's waiting at the other end of that walk.
Steve Bowne keeps an eye on what's actually shifting in Willits, the kind of local detail that doesn't show up in a listing description but shapes what it's like to live here day to day. If you want to talk about the town, the market, or anything in between, Let's Connect.
