(The Associated Press circulated the following article on August 31.)
HAUSER, Idaho — At the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway’s new refueling station here, locomotive No. 4141 blasted through an opening ceremony ribbon.
Railroad officials hope that’s the last time something breaks at the huge pit stop for freight trains hauling cargo between Chicago and Pacific Northwest ports. The ceremony was Tuesday and the station opens for business on Wednesday just east of Spokane, Wash.
The facility is built atop an aquifer that is the sole source of drinking water for some 400,000 people in the Spokane area, but railroad officials insist they built so many safeguards in the $42 million project that the water will remain safe.
“I’ve never seen a facility designed with this level of protection,” said project manager Kenny Hancock of the engineering firm Hanson-Wilson Inc. of Kansas City, Mo.
The facility can refuel and reprovision 10 locomotives at a time, in 30 to 45 minutes, railroad officials said. That compares to refueling stops of as long as 10 hours at crowded railyards in Seattle, Vancouver or Pasco, Wash., company spokesman Gus Melonas said. Those facilities will continue to operate.
Faster refueling means locomotives, which cost $2 million each, can spend more time hauling loads, said Ron Jackson, general manager of the railroad’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 Pacific Northwest ports, coupled with record shipments of Northwest grain overseas, have stretched the firm’s capacity, Jackson said.
“Freight is up 12 percent over last year,” Jackson said. “We need to keep locomotives moving.”
The new refueling station is different from traditional yards, where locomotives are often disconnected from their loads and taken into a roundhouse for service, a process that takes hours.
At the Hauser facility, tracks bring loaded trains right up to the pumps, where 10 locomotives at a time can receive new loads of up to 3,500 gallons of diesel fuel, plus oil for lubrication, traction sand and water. Then the trains chug right out of the open-air building and on toward Seattle or Chicago.
When the facility 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. 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.