State to buy 300 miles of railroad line

OLYMPIA – Washington state taxpayers are buying 300 miles of old railroad line as part of a state effort to keep rail service alive in small towns across Eastern Washington.

The Washington State Department of Transportation said Monday that it’s agreed to pay $8 million for the Palouse River and Coulee City Railroad right-of-way. It’s primarily a grain line, carrying 20 percent of the state’s grain shipments, although the PCC line also carries seed, farm chemicals and lumber.

The railroad serves more than 70 businesses in Whitman, Lincoln, Grant, Spokane, Columbia and Walla Walla counties.

The PCC lines stretch roughly from Coulee City through Davenport, Medical Lake and Cheney, then south through Spangle, Garfield and Pullman, then west toward Endicott.

“This keeps our goods moving to market,” said Glen Squires, of the Washington Wheat Commission. “Our economy depends on it.”

Hearing that message, state lawmakers authorized buying the rail line last year. The state intends to spend $22 million fixing up the line over the next eight years.

“We’re hoping that with the rehabilitation, there won’t be any closures,” said Judy Giniger, director of the department’s public transportation and rail division. WATCO, the Kansas-based company that runs the PCC Railroad, said last year that it might have to abandon “significant sections” of the line by 2006, due to a worsening backlog of track repairs. Many of the trestles are decades old, and some of the rails date back to the 1890s, limiting the rail cars to a slow crawl.

“This relieves them of the burden of fixing years of deferred maintenance,” said Giniger. WATCO bought the lines from larger railroads in the early 1990s.

Before the state agreed to buy the lines, state rail technicians spent months inspecting hundreds of miles of track and combing the railroad’s books to see if the line is economically viable.

Giniger said WATCO will continue to run its railroad on the tracks. The state will lease the tracks back to the company. The price: maintaining the track before and after it’s rehabilitated by the state.

“The lease is the maintenance,” she said. “They’re going to be investing in this state-owned right-of-way.”

How much will that be? Giniger, citing ongoing negotiations with WATCO, said she couldn’t name a specific figure.

“It will be in the millions (of dollars) over time,” she said.

The state’s 15-year renewable lease with WATCO also requires the company to “maintain and strengthen its customer base” so that the line’s finances are healthy.

Washington has bought decaying rail lines before, but never one this big. The results have been mixed. In the mid-1990s, the state bought a 25-mile stretch of track between Othello and Royal City, and another 20-mile line from Toppenish to White Swan. The Othello-Royal City line died out, although another railroad later offered to restore rail service there. The Toppenish-White Swan line flourished, spawning two new sawmills.

The state plans to upgrade the track so that trains can run faster with larger rail cars. Those efficiencies, WATCO has said, will sharply reduce operating costs and help make the line profitable.

Some have questioned why the state is essentially subsidizing a privately owned railroad company.

“That’s been a question: Is this the right thing to do?” said Giniger. “But nobody’s said stop. The growers and the shippers out there feel that it’s very important to their ability to get their products to market.”

In a study last year, state transportation analysts said that without the railroad, there would be 29,000 more heavy truckloads on state and county roads each year. Shippers would pay an extra $2 million a year for trucking and the trucks would cause $4 million more in damage to local roads.