Commuter rail could expand to the east side of Lake Washington under a proposal being considered by Sound Transit. Seattle's Cascadia Center has proposed spending $37 million to upgrade an existing 42-mile rail line between Renton and the town of Snohomish. Once that's done, it wants to do trial runs between Snohomish and Bellevue to gauge potential ridership before deciding whether to spend another $250 million or so to build stations and parking lots. Since last fall's failure of the $17.8 billion Proposition 1 transit plan, the Snohomish-Bellevue-Renton rail project has become "the new darling of the public transportation world," Bruce Agnew, Cascadia Center's director, told reporters. The Port of Seattle is buying the rails from King County, which had wanted to rip them out to make way for a trail.