Taking responsibility for their neighborhood, a new South Renton group spent a Saturday morning picking up liquor bottles and trimming bushes.

“Without action, that whole area is just going to get worse,” said Brian Van Houten of the South Renton Connection Group. “This is not OK. We’re not OK with this.”

After the Spirit of Washington Dinner Train stopped running, the railroad along Houser Way from South Fifth Street and Smithers Avenue South slowly attracted illegal dumping, the homeless and even some drug trades, Van Houten said.

“Everybody liked walking through there when it was nice,” he said.

Their decision to clean up the tracks earned applause from locals; but for the group it’s just the beginning of an effort to revitalize their neighborhood.

“I’ve been getting calls from people asking who did it,” said Norma McQuiller, coordinator of the City of Renton’s Neighborhood Program. “It’s remarkable what they accomplished.”

About 10 volunteers filled two dump trucks with branches and weeds and took away about three truck loads of garbage.

The group hauled away two mattresses, one that was once set on fire, beer cans and two broken bicycles.

Despite the July 11 effort, it only took about a week for a “kitchen-sized mess” to grow on the tracks and a few homeless camps to return. The fence still has about two dozen holes, Van Houten said.

“On Monday I was driving by, and some kid throws his beer can,” Van Houten said. “I confronted him on it, and he was like ‘get on out of here’.”

It was disappointing but not defeating, Van Houten said. “We want to continue to keep pulling the weeds in there and slowly get it recovered to what it was before.”

Distributing its fliers in both English and Spanish, the South Renton Connection Group continues to reach out to those in South Renton and downtown.

It attracted about 325 neighbors to a neighborhood barbeque, Van Houten said. “For South Renton that’s huge.”

In April the group hosted an Easter egg hunt, which attracted about 40 kids, and in May about 30 neighbors participated in the bike-to-work program.

“We started back in April. A couple of us kind of got together and said we should do something,” Van Houten said.

There was a time where neighbors knew each other and lived in community, he said.

“That’s missing,” he added. He wants his neighborhood to become “more than just a place that people drive through, but a place where people know people.”