(The following editorial appeared on the Great Falls Tribune on April 23, 2010.)
GREAT FALLS, Mont. — A good start.
That’s what we’d call the news that BNSF Railway is removing about a third of the rail cars that have marred the landscape from Great Falls to the Wolf Creek Canyon for the past three years.
The news is good for two reasons:
• The cars have been sitting idle within plain view of what is certainly one of the most scenic stretches of Interstate highway in the nation. Removing even some of the cars will be an improvement.
• That the railroad has sufficient business demand to need the cars bodes well for the nation’s economy.
It was the recession and related business slowdown that prompted BNSF to take the cars — used to haul shipping containers and timber — out of use, starting three years ago.
The Great Falls-to-Wolf Creek stretch was chosen as a storage yard because a washout on the track in the Ulm area has rendered the line useless for through traffic.
We’re not sure if “rail-car utilization” is a widely recognized economic indicator, but as it turns out the idling of the BNSF cars was well under way before economists started sounding alarm bells about the recession.
In fact, when those bells did start sounding a year and a half ago, economists said in hindsight that the recession had begun a year earlier.
In any case, BNSF this week started putting more than a thousand of the parked cars back online to handle shipping. A railroad spokesman said that within the next few weeks about half of the cars in the Wolf Creek Canyon will have been removed.
The news was welcomed by anglers and area residents who have been complaining about the cars’ presence for almost the entire three years.
“They’re all graffitied-up and ugly,” Great Falls fishing guide Kris Keller said. “You bring a client from New York in and instead of just seeing the beautiful willows and trees, they see these ugly rail cars.”
“We hope to see those rail cars hauling freight instead of cluttering the canyon with rail cars,” said Rep. Anders Blewett, D-Great Falls, who introduced an unsuccessful bill in the ’09 Legislature to censure the railroad for idling the cars along the river. “Hopefully BNSF avoids dumping its rail cars in the Missouri River corridor the next time the economy tanks.”
“The residents of central Montana are eager to reclaim the Missouri River corridor,” Blewett said.
“The dumping of these cars hurts tourism, reduces property values and compromises a spectacular landscape,” he added.
We agree; keep your fingers crossed for even more good news in the not-too-distant future.