Believe me, several sites were considered. As mentioned, grade is a big problem all over the Palouse. Flat spots are usually occupied by a town. There were other sites that would have been MUCH easier, but landowners didn't want to sell. We were also limited in sites which were directly adjacent to the existing railroad for cost reasons. Due to mainline improvement considerations, it also had to be north of MP 35--where the 112# CWR ends. The best thing (so far) is that this site approval was grandfathered in to the previous BNSF requirements regarding track length. It used to be 7200' in the clear. It is now 8200'.

Shuttle loops take a decent footprint of land to drop into. The true loop is the most efficient regarding track-length with just a train-length of track plus crossovers to the mainline to build, but they need a footprint of roughly 1550' by 3250'. The Balloon type needs a place to put the "bubble" that has an open area for a circle just under 1550' in diameter. The lead can parallel the existing mainline the rest of the way, but the required track length is just over a train and a half in length--assuming that you can build the elevator at the exact halfway point on the bubble. The Linear facility takes by far the least land, since the would thing can parallel the main, but it takes a little over twice the train length of clear track to build. In 3 miles of the W&I, you could be required to build more than a couple brand new bridges doing a linear facility, not to mention the wetland mitigation nightmare around the creek bed.

When a shipper approaches with a parcel of land to start with (like Ritzville Warehouse did with us designers at Templin), anybody familiar with that one knows that we had to cut into the hillside on the northeast corner to make it fit. Down at the Agri-Northwest facility at Plymouth (on the Columbia River), land wasn't an issue,, but the sloping of the land to the north meant that the entire north half of the loop is in 20-30' of cut. The loop at Carter, MT is on land sloping to the Missouri River, so the back half is on a fill up to 15' tall.