I was doing some consulting for the city of Pullman at the time, and MRL's proposal of 5 trains a day caused quite a stir---think of all the train horns and such. Much of the traffic that MRL was proposing was new traffic and would have had little impact on BNSF through Pasco. I know of more than a few railfans that talked to MRL about it after they dropped the project---seems that once they make a decision they don't revisit it. Prior to BNSF putting the line up for sale, BNSF was taking steps to reopen the lower P&L and had inspected all the bridges---found that 95% needed no work---and had cleared all the trees that had grown up and had cleared all the horrible blackberry bushes that had grown over the tracks between Kendrick and Arrow (I was down there one day they were working on the berry bushes and it was a really nasty task even with power tools). When Krebs ousted Grinstine (excuse spelling) all such projects were put on hold---had Stampede Pass not been so far along (and so many promises made to the state) Krebs wanted to kill that project too (he has a thing about duplicate lines going to the same places, among other issues). BNSF plans were to run logs from the STMA to Lewiston, WI&M crew was already undergoing training for the move when reopening the lower P&L and upgrading the WI&M projects were killed. Plan was for one crew to run from Bovill to Lewiston, also outbound Lewiston traffic was to return to the P&L and go via Spokane rather than Pasco. Another year of Grinstine and it would have happened, it was all set in the budget until Krebs cut the budget stating that the projects could not be afforded due to cost overruns associated with the BNSF merger. (See also Journal of Commerce newspaper of that timeframe). People were quite excited at the time as BNSF had also contacted some grain elevators about running shuttles to Lewiston, something MRL had also planned to do as well. Such promiss lost!!