The Great Handcar Regatta may soon be derailed.
The free-form celebration of creativity will bring human-powered rail contraptions and retro costumery to Santa Rosa's Railroad Square for the fourth year on Sept. 25.
But Ty Jones, event co-founder, said Thursday that a SMART train official told him the regatta cannot use the tracks next year.
"I'm just sort of dumbstruck," Jones said. "If you want to come, you'd better come this year because you may never go again."
Jones said that while he was speaking with an official of the Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit district about the regatta's request for a permit to use the tracks for its races in nine days, the official said the tracks at Railroad Square will not be available after this year.
The conflict, Jones said, appears to be that SMART expects to be doing construction in the Railroad Square area next year in preparation for the opening of two-county commuter rail service.
SMART's new executive director, Farhad Mansourian, was in meetings on Thursday and was not available to comment.
When Jones and Spring Maxfield and their helpers staged the first Handcar Regatta on unused tracks in 2008, they gave no thought to when trains might return.
"It was kind of conceived as a short-term project," Jones said.
In 2008, nobody anticipated it would grow into a huge annual downtown event on par with the Luther Burbank Rose Parade. Last year's regatta crowd was estimated at 12,000 to 15,000.
As the regatta evolved, Jones and his partners concentrated on making it better and didn't think much about when SMART, which has struggled with financial and other obstacles and has set back the scheduled start of commuter service, would take control of the rails.
The regatta crew knew that would eventually happen, and so to be told that their festival cannot use the tracks in 2012 was a shock, but not a surprise.
Jones figures that time will tell if SMART will have begun construction in Railroad Square by this time next year, and if the Handcar Regatta will be displaced by that work.
Jones said it's possible that losing access to the tracks wouldn't have to be the death of the regatta.
Perhaps, he said, "It may not be a rail thing anymore."
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