Brian Wrote:
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> With so many of the Grain Elevator branch lines
> now gone in Canada and the USA, what has changed
> with these elevators? I assume we aren't shipping
> any less grain? And I assume it has to all go by
> truck now. So does that mean that more of it just
> shipped directly to the source by the farmers or
> do the farmers simply drive farther to larger and
> larger grain elevators on the few remaining lines
> that are left?
> Brian

Brian,
You are right, we aren't shipping any less grain, the only thing that has changed is the way it is shipped. I live in the Palouse region of eastern Washington and northwestern Idaho, and I am surrounded by a sea of wheat.
At least in my area, most of the grain branches were torn up because most of the grain goes by barge down the Snake and Columbia rivers. There actually are a lot of elevators that have been torn up, mostly in bigger (for the region lol) towns where people are no longer ok with having one lane of the street/highway blocked by a line of grain trucks waiting to unload. There are now a lot of small silos on each farm that hold what that farm/acreage can produce, and after harvest the grain goes there. From there, it gets put into semi truck, where it is taken to the nearest riverside grain terminal & loaded on a barge for the trip to Portland, where it gets put into a ship bound for Asia. I can't say what UP says (but I assume it's the same), but with BNSF, they actually charge more per car for single cars of grain that they do for for a unit train. The big issue here is that most elevators aren't big enough to load 110 cars! Even when the W&I runs a 110 car train, the train is split between all the elevators in two or three towns.
Matt
Moscow ID