By NEIL MODIE
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

As many as eight passenger trains a day used to stop in Skykomish, one of the reasons Rosemarie Williams remembers her childhood in the 1930s as "a really good time to grow up here."

"When the train used to stop here, it was wonderful. People could go from here to Everett or the other little towns down the (Skykomish River) valley, or to Seattle," says Williams, 69, whose father and husband were railroaders.

"We had stable families. We had employment -- we had the railroad, we had the cement plant, we had the lumber mill, we had the logging, we had the Forest Service."

That small-town cohesiveness and community self-reliance are still evident here. And trains, 29 a day, still thunder through the middle of town. But they no longer stop.

In fact, officials of the Burlington Northern & Santa Fe Railway tried last year to have the town lift the 25 mph speed limit for trains passing through Skykomish, despite the close proximity of the tracks to downtown and the Skykomish School. Town leaders squelched the request.

The old Great Northern Railway that built this Cascade foothills community was merged long ago into what now is the BN & Santa Fe. The tracks, slicing Skykomish in half, symbolize both the glory days of the town's past and the problems it faces today.

In the first half of the century, the community near the upper end of the Skykomish River valley was a booming, brawling railroad and logging town, remote but filled with activity and jobs.

Gold, silver and copper miners added to the raucous social mix. More optimistic than successful, they left behind such names as Money Creek and Gold Bar, the town 20 miles down the Skykomish Valley.

Today Skykomish still has many of the buildings of its boom days, and appears much the way it did then, only smaller.

Ted Cleveland is a retired Great Northern engineer who was born in Skykomish in 1930, moved away as a teenager and eventually moved back.

"What's happened in Skykomish is, first of all, the mill went out; then the cement plant went out; the railroad went out because they changed their way of railroading; and then the logging went out because everything got logged off," says Cleveland, now the mayor of Skykomish.

What remains from railroad days is a legacy of pollution, some of it more than a century old.

For decades, untold thousands of gallons of diesel and bunker oil spilled and leaked into the ground and the South Fork Skykomish River from the Great Northern's former fueling and electrical transmission operations at Skykomish. The severity and extent of the problem aren't yet known.

When Cleveland was a youngster in the 1940s, he remembers that "you'd never fish below the bridge into town ... because your fishing pole would be clogged with oil."

"We really do not know how much is down there," says Lorna Goebel, a Skykomish resident and geochemist, recently retired from the University of Washington. "We know it's a very large amount. Some people have even said it's the largest spill in the state."

Goebel is a member of the Skykomish Environmental Coalition, which is working on the problem with representatives of the railroad and the state Department of Ecology.

Most townspeople don't seem deeply concerned with the problem, however.