[6] In 1993, Mac Sebree, publisher of PRN and owner of Interurban Press, retired and sold the entire business to Pentrex.

Pentrex eventually decided to discontinue publication of all of its magazines, and the final issue of RailNews was that dated August 1999.

Until 1989, coverage of urban rail transit was also presented in the form of regular locally compiled news columns covering the then-few light rail systems in the West Coast states, supplemented at the back of the magazine by a separate one-page column (by publisher Mac Sebree) giving briefer rail-transit news on the rest of the country; the latter was called "Interurbans Newsletter" in tribute to a previous newsletter which had given birth to Interurban Press, PRN's publisher.

In fall 1989, the individual columns on west coast light rail systems and the "Interurbans" column were combined into a single, smaller news section for rail transit,[8] and other sections of the magazine were also reorganized at that time.

[10] "Pacific" was dropped altogether from the magazine's name in 1997, as coverage was expanded to include the Eastern U.S.