dn1869
Allow me to clarify my question is this way: What is the largest urban area in the lower 48 States that has no common carrier service provided within 25 miles? Does this make my question more specific?
Well, out here in California, it's a little hard sometimes to tell what is a suburb and what is an "urban area." The Rand McNally Marketing Atlas considers Eureka-Arcata a metro area, with an estimated Y2K population of more than 90,000, although Humboldt County doesn't qualify as a Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area by Census Bureau criteria (and Eureka certainly isn't a suburb of anything!). As far as I know, the former Northwestern Pacific (and successor Eureka Southern) terminus has not had any rail freight service for several years now. The nearest active line (on and off, at least) is over 150 miles south at Willits, is it not? (Someone will let me know if I'm wrong....)
Granted, just considering core cities, Eureka combined with nearby Arcata would only count something more than 40,000 heads, but I believe there are quite a few folks living in the immediate hinterlands. I gather that timber (especially redwood) was the principal local industry up into the 1970's, and there may still be some commercial ocean fishing thereabouts. (I don't really want to get sidetracked into a big eco-political argument at this point.) But apparently there is no longer sufficient freight business up that way to justify the enormous, recurring costs of maintaining a right-of-way through the flood-prone Eel River canyon.
I mentioned "suburbs": Farther south in California, Thousand Oaks (pop. 125,000 or so), about 10 miles up the hill from Camarillo and about 10 miles over the mountain from Moorpark (both on UP's ex-SP Coast Line through Ventura County) has never had rail service and probably never will, because of terrain. And a new "exurb" has arisen in recent decades in southwestern Riverside County: both Temecula and adjacent Murrieta now have municipal populations in excess of 90,000, but they have grown so fast that I guess no one has quite decided what category their combined population (a quarter to a third of a million, including hinterland) fits, demographically speaking. I think the nearest rail service to either one of them is about 20 highway-miles away at Perris, on BNSF's former Hemet/San Jacinto Branch. Speaking of which, Rand McNally also postulates that the Hemet-San Jacinto area is now a distinct urb, with about 125-130 thousand of its own.
The thing is, growth in the last four areas I've mentioned (in Ventura and Riverside Counties) has accompanied the decline of the agricultural industries that used to justify rail freight service on (for instance) the old Santa Fe's San Jacinto and Elsinore branches. Where any new industry has arisen to replace them, they are of the "light" variety. (Vineyards are big right now in the vicinity of Temecula, but I'm not sure they constitute an exception.) Since the 1960s, most of the former fields and orchards have been subdivided for long-distance commuters (on the new Interstates) and retirees. The same is true in the Lancaster-Palmdale and Victorville-Hesperia districts of the high deserts north of the LA-SBDO-RIV megalopolis, except that Lancaster and Victorville have remained railroad towns to some extent.
