(The following story by Nicholas K. Geranios appeared on the Portland Oregonian website on August 31.)
HAUSER, Idaho — Locomotive 4141 blasted through the opening ceremony ribbon Monday at the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway Co.’s new refueling station in Hauser.
Railroad officials hope that is the only time something breaks at the huge pit stop for freight trains hauling cargo between Chicago and Pacific Northwest ports.
The facility is built atop the aquifer that is the sole source of drinking water for 400,000 people in the Spokane area. Railroad officials insist they built so many safeguards into the $42 million project that the water will remain safe.
The station opens Wednesday.
The stationcan refuel and reprovision 10 locomotives at a time in 30 to 45 minutes, railroad officials said. That compares with refueling stops of as long as 10 hours at crowded rail yards in Seattle, Vancouver or Pasco, Wash., BNSF spokesman Gus Melonas said. Those facilities will continue to operate, he said.
The station is not expected to have much effect on rail congestion problems in Oregon and Washington, which are primarily on Union Pacific lines.
If anything, the station shows how the BNSF has ignored Wall Street critics and invested in capital projects while Union Pacific misjudged its future needs for workers and locomotives, said Bob Melbo, a rail planner for the Oregon Department of Transportation and a former superintendent for the Southern Pacific railroad in Oregon.
“If nothing else, it’s sort of a point of comparison,” Melbo said. “One railroad has been more diligent in investing for the future and has been criticized by Wall Street for it. UP has been more conservative about future capital investment and strategically has kind of made some miscalculations.”
Faster refueling does mean locomotives, which cost $2 million each, can spend more time hauling loads, said Ron Jackson, general manager of BNSF’s Northwest Division in Seattle.
That’s particularly important these days, as BNSF is setting records for the number of cars its trains are pulling and the revenues it is collecting. Huge numbers of incoming cargo containers at Northwest ports, coupled with record shipments of Northwest grain overseas, have stretched capacity, Jackson said.
“Freight is up 12 percent over last year,” Jackson said. “We need to keep locomotives moving.”
Hauser, just east of Spokane, is a major crossroads for BNSF’s northern main lines.
At traditional refueling yards, locomotives often are disconnected from their loads and taken into a roundhouse for service, a process that takes hours, BNSF officials said.
At the Hauser facility, tracks bring loaded trains to the pumps, where 10 locomotives at a time can receive new loads of as much as 3,500 gallons of diesel fuel, plus oil for lubrication, traction sand and water. Then the trains chug out of the open-air building and toward Seattle or Chicago.
A train can travel as far as 1,000 miles on one fill-up, depending on its load, Melonas said. The nearest refueling station to the east is Havre, Mont.
Between 25 and 40 trains a day can be serviced at the new facility, BNSF said. That represents about 50 percent of its traffic in the region.
The station has two 250,000-gallon above-ground tanks of diesel fuel on site, with the supply replenished daily by rail, BNSF officials said.
When the stattion was first announced, numerous groups mobilized in opposition because they feared a spill would contaminate the aquifer. A citizens’ group, Friends of the Aquifer, tried to block the station but failed.
“We pushed the issue as far as we could basically afford to go, and we lost,” member Julian Powers said Monday.
The group does claim credit for making BNSF provide greater protections for the aquifer, Powers said. “But the basic danger is still there,” he said.
Environmental protections include two plastic underground liners with leak detection equipment, double-walled pipes and double-bottomed storage tanks, the railroad said.
(Brent Hunsberger of The Oregonian contributed to this report.)