When I worked for the State of Idaho a few years ago, I was an advocate of raising GVW limits in North Central Idaho. Not just from Grangeville to Lewiston, but also for US Highway 12 from the Montana state line to Lewiston (at least from Missoula to the state line). The reasoning was that we could create a virtual rail link between the MRL at Missoula and the Port of Lewiston for export products that weren't getting the needed rail service from BNSF nor UP.

That reasoning has become more apparent despite several rate concessions from BNSF over the last few years - BNSF has reduced the number of COFC offerings out of Montana, while concurrently the demand for containerized grain options has increased. One of my last proposals was to get Idaho and Montana to allow fully loaded "b-train" and "super b-train" combos (the former two 20' containers, the latter two 40' grain hoppers), from some point in Montana to the Port of Lewiston over US 12. We even considered using the RailRunner bi-modal chassis concept running over MRL between the Billings area to Missoula, as that would alleviate the more strict GVW limits over I-90 (Interstates are limited to 80,000 GVW, while US and State highways in Montana allow(ed?) 120,000 GVW).

(Oops! Getting off topic! Sorry.)

That being said, you will see more and more grain off the Camas Prairie being loaded into containers and shipped by truck to the Port of Lewiston, and I'm not sure the railroad can accomodate this type of traffic over that short of a haul - maybe they could borrow a concept from the Southern from a few years ago and place two 20' containers on a 60' flat and then have bagged grain loaded into the containers at Cottonwood. Granted, plenty of grain will go bulk to Lewiston, where it can be transloaded to bulk barges, 286k rail hoppers, or else bagged and packed into export containers. But with the loss of doublestack rail service between Lewiston and Seattle, it is likely that the BG&CM will lose some of it's potential grain traffic if this trend toward containerization continues.