"Some of us remember how the ground would shake when the few Union Pacific trains would rumble by," Pedersen says. "We could live with that."

Those trains got quiet about 20 years ago. But then the Utah Transit Authority bought the right of way.

Pedersen doesn't want a trendier TRAX train to pick up where the freight trains left off. I understand his frustration. Decades without train traffic seems like a precedent. At the very least, it lulls a homeowner into a sense that the tracks have been abandoned.

I'm less sympathetic to Draper's newbies, the neighbors who bought their $500,000 homes next to the tracks in the past 10 years - after light rail became a very obvious reality on other little-used Salt Lake Valley tracks. They say developers lied to them, told them the tracks would become a trail. Now, they're fighting Utah Transit Authority's plans to run TRAX through Draper's east bench.

"I don't minimize the concerns of some of the residents," says Mayor Darrell Smith. "But there's a railroad in your backyard. Pay attention. Ask questions. In some cases, they may have been misled by developers."

There's a lot of that going around Draper these days. Homes are sinking into South Mountain. Suncrest's roads are crumbling - leading to threats of a lawsuit from the developer who laid the roads and a claim for damages from another developer who blames the city for allowing subpar infrastructure to be built. After passing a new geologic hazards ordinance last month, Draper leaders now plan to post a "historic" monument of landslide zones and earthquake faults to alert homeowners.

Calling this growing pains insults adolescence. Draper leads the state in McMansions. And the 'burb of 37,000 managed to snatch IKEA away from bigger neighbors to the north. Otherwise, the place seems a mess.

I grew up in Draper when it was a cow town - literally. The stink from the Days' dairy and the pig farm was reason for jabs at kids who lived in Draper. But I kind of miss the old town.

Today, Draper calls itself a ''fast-growing suburban city with the heart of a small town.'' Emphasis on the fast-growing. Draper's growth outpaced its City Hall and its politicians. A larger, more sophisticated city might have had the inspectors and the rules in place to keep Suncrest from falling apart.

But Draper wasn't larger then - and developers knew it. Now, the city is scrambling to mitigate the still-emerging nasty surprises of those free-wheeling years.

Luckily, many residents have found a zen place.

"There have been a couple of sinking houses, but there haven't been mudslides and catastrophes up there," says Suncrest resident Robert Bradfield. "Whether or not a house sinks . . . they're doing a lot of cool things."

Om.

walsh@sltrib.com