(The following story by Kim Briggeman appeared on the Billings Gazette website on August 3, 2009.)
BILLINGS, Mont. — Things were pretty quiet around the Missoula train yard on Monday.
A Montana Rail Link switch engine shuffled short strings of boxcars from one track to another. An empty grain train sat stranded, waiting for Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad “power” to pull it back to the east side of the mountains.
“What you see right here is basically local traffic, and we still have some blocks of eastbound traffic,” said trainmaster Jeff Adams.
In normal times, 13 to 15 through trains would be rattling through these yards each day, along with a contingent of locals hauling products from the likes of Smurfit-Stone at Frenchtown or the Roseburg Forest Products mill in Missoula.
A rock slide on July 20 at a construction site in the Mullan Tunnel northwest of Helena blocked the route, forcing MRL to either reroute to BNSF tracks on the Hi-Line or park the trains. What at first appeared to be a one-week cleanup for Missoula-based MRL looks like it’ll stretch to nearly three after another setback early Sunday.
Mere hours before the tunnel was to be reopened, a 20-foot ceiling section and five of 22 newly installed steel arches collapsed in the middle of the tight 3,896-foot tunnel.
“We’re reinforcing the concrete in that area in particular, and now we’re spacing the steel sets every 2 feet instead of 3,” said MRL spokeswoman Lynda Frost.
Rail Link officials estimate it’ll be Sunday before the tunnel can be reopened.
“We’d like to think it would be sooner, but we don’t have any reason to feel like it will be at this point,” Frost said.
“Part of the challenge I think is the debris that has come down is laced with iron, so it even creates a little bit more of a challenge.”
Two 18-man crews are working 12-hour shifts to get train traffic moving through the tunnel again. Frost said the full economic hit won’t be known until after the line is opened again, but it will be significant to the 22-year-old Rail Link.
“The only extended shutdown I can recall was when we lost a bridge by Thompson Falls (in December 1990). But that was still less than a week,” Frost said.
MRL announced on its Web site that all through-freight service jobs are being abolished until further notice. Some trains are being rerouted along BNSF track from Sandpoint, Idaho, to the Montana Hi-Line and on to Laurel -an option that is said to be costly and in some cases not viable.
With a few exceptions, the long-haul locomotives are operated by BNSF, which has moved them elsewhere.
“They’ve taken the power so they can run other things,” Adams said.
At midafternoon Monday, 777 cars were idled in Missoula waiting for locomotives to pull them. An unscheduled, or “makeup,” train was being built.
“Basically we’ll build a train out of here, in one way, shape or form, probably once a day going to Spokane, just from the traffic we acquire from our local customers,” Adams said.
The goal is to get the longest train possible, up to 8,000 feet, or 4,400 tons per locomotive.
“We try to utilize as much capacity of our trains as we can, so we’re not just running a 50-car train,” Adams said.
The empty 110-car grain train was one of five sitting on tracks between Missoula and Helena. There was another just east of town, and others at Bearmouth, Clinton and Jens.
Montana Rail Link employs roughly 1,000 men and women. Frost said most of its operations workers and about half its mechanical crews have been placed on emergency furloughs while the troubles play out.
Meanwhile, maintenance workers are taking advantage by going full bore on bridge and track repairs. In the Missoula yards, three of the six switch jobs have been temporarily eliminated.
Adams said “pool turns” were eliminated on Monday, so operating crews that are assigned to trains east and west are all on one general shift board now. Rail Link’s headquarters in Missoula, which includes the dispatch and accounting departments, haven’t been affected by the emergency furloughs yet, Frost said.
Adams said all merchandise trains – those carrying finished-products loads – have been rerouted back to Sandpoint after being “reblocked” to meet BNSF restrictions. Those restrictions require 10 loaded cars on the head end of the main line, Adams said.
Typically that job is done in Laurel, at the beginning of BNSF tracks, on east-bound freight.
“We’re still serving our customers the best we can,” Adams said. “If we can’t service them because the power’s not here, we’ll certainly make an extra move somewhere down the road.”