Barge dependent

McCOY, Wash. — Dustyn Petrovich sat in a control booth overlooking one of 116 unit train cars being loaded with wheat at Pacific Northwest Farmers Cooperative McCoy Rail Terminal.

The facility and others like it at Endicott, Ritzville, and in the Spokane area, are part of discussion about Republican Congressman Mike Simpson’s $33 billion proposal to revive endangered salmon and steelhead runs by breaching the four lower Snake River dams.

In a unit train, the cars for one kind of cargo are kept together as a block as they move around the United States, except if one needs repairs, minimizing labor costs.

At the McCoy facility on the northern Palouse, a graphic on a screen told Petrovich, a PNW employee, exactly where every car was, helping him keep a rapid pace of loading grain into hopper cars at 45,000 to 50,000 bushels per hour.

Through an audio system, he talked with engineers in Spokane, Spangle and Palouse Railroad locomotives to move cars and position them under a spout to be loaded.

Co-workers in harnesses, similar to those used by rock climbers, stood on platforms near the booth opening and closing lids, scrambling on the top of the cars if needed to make adjustments.

The train arrived at the northern Palouse facility near Rosalia around 6 a.m. and would leave at full capacity by mid-afternoon.

It would carry its cargo to Burlington Northern Santa Fe tracks to head to the West Coast where it would be transferred onto an ocean-going vessel possibly bound for Asia.

The multimillion-dollar unit train operation in McCoy provides a glimpse of what that future could look like if Lower Granite and Little Goose dams were breached in 2030 and the same action was taken at Lower Monumental and Ice Harbor dams a year later, as Simpson has recommended.

Simpson’s concept includes $3.6 billion to help farmers, ports, agricultural cooperatives and shippers to adjust to life without slackwater.

Much of the grain raised in north central Idaho and southeastern Washington might head to the Tri-Cities by rail instead of barge if water transportation weren’t available with the increased costs being offset by credits to farmers or a combination of credits to farmers and government investment in rail, according to scenarios being circulated by Simpson’s staff.

Right now unit trains do provide a cost-effective form of transportation for certain Palouse farmers, but almost always, those economics only work for those near McCoy and north, PNW’s CEO Shawn O’Connell said.

“The goal is for it to be profitable,” said O’Connell, emphasizing PNW needs all forms of transportation and is against breaching the four lower Snake River dams.

“At this point in time, it’s one of the largest facilities in the region, and it’s able to pay its way,” he said.

Those realities point to how complicated it would be for unit trains to replace barging, he said, especially for farmers on the Camas Prairie and southern sections of the Palouse who send little, if any, of their crops by rail now.

Farmers near Colfax and Palouse areas closer to the Snake River, as well as those on the Camas Prairie, barge wheat to Portland or other West Coast ports because the combined cost of trucking it to the river and barging it is less than trucking it to McCoy or other unit train terminal and paying for rail, O’Connell said.

Typically hauling grain on a unit train is 30 percent more than barging, and moving wheat on other types of trains is even more costly, O’Connell said.

The savings unit trains provide comes from the volume and how they are handled.

Nationwide, unit trains run anywhere from 25 to 116 cars, and are grouped based on the type of commodity they carry. The ones servicing McCoy are normally 110 to 116 cars.

Other trains are comprised of cars carrying a variety of goods, and many, such as chemicals and lumber, ride in specially designed cars.

In those instances, the cars are decoupled and sent to a number of customers in an area to deliver or receive cargo before being put back together and sent to another destination, adding labor costs unit trains don’t have, O’Connell said.

The efficiency of unit trains makes them popular, and not just with wheat growers in northern Washington and Idaho.

When PNW reserves a unit train, it might be competing with agricultural businesses anywhere in the nation who want to get wheat, corn or soybeans to buyers, O’Connell said.

“It’s another market,” he said. “We can’t just call the (BNSF) and order a unit train for next week on Tuesday at 10 o’clock. A tremendous amount of planning and preparation and projection has to go into place.”

Generally PNW uses 20 to 30 unit trains a year, trying to buy no more capacity than it needs, O’Connell said.

“It’s a combination of having trains available, having a place to deliver them because you have to have a sale,” he said. “You try and time … the trains (at harvest) coming in to keep the facility fluid.”

Navigating the unit train market is something PNW has been doing since 2013, when its McCoy facility opened.

Putting the 20-acre facility together with its more than 1 mile of rail line, high-speed conveyor belts and other equipment along with about 1 million bushels of storage, not counting ground piles, was a complicated project that couldn’t be easily replicated, O’Connell said.

“Those acres were not flat when we purchased the property,” he said. “It took a tremendous amount of money and movement of the dirt to create not only the flat for the tracks, but also the ground piles.”

The state of Washington played a role too. It is the owner of the rail branches that serve McCoy and Endicott and invested millions in repairs on the tracks, which are leased by short lines and can be used by any shipper, said Janet Matkin, a spokeswoman for the Washington State Department of Transportation Rail, Freight and Ports Division.

The enormity of what went into developing the relatively small amount of rail in the region concerns O’Connell, who believes farmers and the communities where they live would be among those who would suffer more than others if Simpson’s concept moves forward.

The whole area has evolved based on its transportation infrastructure and he said he worries the price of creating an alternative is higher than what Simpson has suggested.

“I know that Congressman Simpson doesn’t want to pick losers or winners, but there’s no way around it,” he said.

Like O’Connell, Washington State Department of Transportation officials believe there are many unknowns about what would happen if the dams were breached.

“There is not enough information to determine detailed transportation impacts,” Matkin said.

Williams may be contacted at ewillliam@lmtribune.com or (208) 848-2261.