trackwalker Wrote:
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> Railbaron Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> -----
>
> > 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.


while the area is primarily lumber no mention was made in the original post of what businesses might locate there. I believe it was Nucor steel that wanted to build a plant on the north spit in North Bend but environmentalists shot that down. More recently there were plans to build an LNG plant on the north spit but I don't know what the status is of that. Again the environmentalists were doing everything they could to shut that down. When Rio Grande originally took over SP there was thinking of shipping coal out of Coos Bay but that never went anywhere.

As far as the Gardiner area, which shouldn't be confused with Coos Bay as they are quite a way apart, American Bridge wanted to built a plant there and use rail for materials but that got shot down.

As far as Coos Bay, that is a deep water port and has lots of potential if it could be developed.