Way down on an earlier thread it was asked if Watco ran an excursion between Colfax and Pullman, and the answer is Yes, actually the excursions covered Moscow to Pullman on UP trackage before it was removed, Pullman to Colfax, Colfax to Winona to St. John. Tours were sponsored by Mr. Duncan of the Portland area. Most excursions were sold out and were well recieved but were not promoted more than in the local area. There were plans to do more, but for reasons unknown to me they didn't happen. Currently there has been some local interest in starting and excursion and the best excursion area would be Colfax to Pullman, but I believe the WSDOT lease prevents excursions, although this may have changed. As for shipping to BNSF vs UP from Colfax, often one railroad has better rates over another, and quite often Peas and Lentils are shipped to Texas area ports for export and quite often UP rates make trucking cheaper, where BNSF rates were and are very do-able and a couple of times Spokane Seed trucked to Pullman and used the old Dumas building to load, but that got to be a pain and they just loaded the trucks and sent them long haul to the Gulf ports or they loaded BNSF from their Spokane plant. If the entire PCC system (non-CW) were to have access to both BNSF and UP there is potential for significant traffic increases just by adding access to both roads. Watco did send some UP boxcars to the Pea plant in Palouse for loading but for some reason this was a one time deal (although the shipper wanted more). For a time, Watco had significant chemical business from the BNSF to a chemical plant just outside Colfax, and also had farm machine business from the BNSF to Colfax customers, but Watco's decision to remove the unloading ramp in Colfax killed farm machine business in short order. By the way, Colfax at one time was serviced by both BN and UP. The former Spokane and Inland Empire Electric which eventually ended up under GN ownership terminated one of it's branches in Colfax, around BN merger time, a tunnel a few miles outside of Colfax suffered a partial cave in and they elected to not fix it and just route traffic on the UP to Colfax. This detour eventually expired (in the mid-to-late 1970's I think) and all the former BN trackage simply became UP.
Old photos of Colfax show a signal controled interlocking diamond just across SR 195 from the present day Taco Time building. If you leave Colfax on SR 26 and look to the right as you cross the Palouse River bridge you can see the concrete piers of the old S&IE steel bridge. A covered bridge from this line survives as a farmers driveway and is not too far from the old tunnel site. Whew, sorry to be so long winded, but one thing kinda led to another. Anyway there is opportunity for easy business gains in or near Colfax that wouldn't be economical to do routing around the horn through Winona and Thornton. Besides, the bridge could be fixed in a month and going though all the repurchasing of land, environmental impact statements and studies and STB hearings it would be 5-7 years before a spike gets driven on rebuilding the line between Oakesdale and Thornton, meanwile opportunities slip away and customers relocate to locations they can get the service they need and new industries build elsewhere. You could at least get the service started and then build from there. If you have traffic, it's easier to justify building new trackage to political types than if you use the "if we rebuild it they will come--trust us" method to get government funding.