Funny you should mention that:

[www.railwayage.com]

After that was posted earlier this year, we heard from a number of interested and curious parties. RA editor in chief Bill Vantuono immediately chimed in with a point that I had already considered by didn't bother to add to the story: hundreds of older DOT-111s would soon be retired from crude and be available for water. A consultant in the railcar repair business cited prices for cleaning and re-lining the interiors of former crude cars that would be a small fraction of the cost of buying/building new cars for water service.

It should also be noted that whatever gallon/tonnage figures my story mentioned per train did not take into account the higher weight/density of H20 vs. crude and other commonly conveyed liquids, so unit trains hauling water would be filled to considerably less than their physical volume.

Load 'em up on sidings or industrial trackage on either side of the Columbia River west of Pasco or Hinkle, then run 'em south through Oregon. That should help keep the added traffic away from some of the region's worst areas of congestion, and it would source from a water supply that otherwise drains a bajillion gallons into the Pacific anyway, so there should be minimal gripe from anyone claiming that their water supply is being robbed.

Unit trains could be unloaded where possible, perhaps even at crude receiving terminals, which could broker some concessions in favor of those refiners ("we'll unload one train of water for every two or three trains of oil, if y'all quit yer complain'n"). Individual cars or blocks of water could be spotted where needed and practical. Small to medium municipal water systems, fire departments (especially in rural/remote places), ag irrigation, whatever. You couldn't possibly move enough trainloads of water into CA fast enough to solve all of the state's drought, but it could provide meaningful help to some of the hardest hit communities.

Who would pay for it? That's for the folks in city halls and county seats and Sacto and D.C. to sort out, along with perhaps a few deep-pocketed big thinkers in places like Omaha or Seattle or Hollywood (OK, perhaps not all of them big thinkers). The purchase and import of water into CA and other states is nothing new. The chairman of one particular railroad says he already has a team looking into water by rail; they're still figuring out the financial logistics of it all.