Railbaron Wrote:
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> Unfortunately I'm not so sure anything will come
> of this. There have been other proposals for sites
> along the Coos Bay Line even before SP sold it and
> nothing ever came of any of them; the
> environmentalists wanted nothing to do with
> business on the coast.

All there is is timber, and the timber is cheaper to truck than to ship by rail. Coos Bay is a very small port and the ships thqat can call on that port or many like them are very few and far between. Even Portland is limited in their ability to host large ships. When a grainer arrives in Kalama, it usually goes to Tacoma to top off it's cargo because it cannot clear the bar if fully loaded. Ships are why there is minimal if any shipping on the coast.Mills along the coast were there because of the large timber, now with nothing but small stems, mills are few and far between.
People like to blame the environmentalist. It is and was the core economy that killed rail on the coast. Trucks are substantially cheaper to use in short multiple hauls.