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Powder River Coal Trains by Jeremy Taylor Soft Cover
Powder River Coal Trains by Jeremy Taylor
Soft Cover
104 pages
Copyright 1997
CONTENTS
Foreword5
Chapter 1 ORIGINS 8
Chapter 2 OPERATIONS IN THE BASIN 21
Chapter 3 BNSF OUTBOUND - DISPERSAL 46
Chapter 4 UP OUTBOUND - UNIFLOW 74
Chapter 5 DESTINATIONS 94
Appendix 100
FOREWORD
Seventy-five miles of windswept high plains separate the outlying mines in Wyoming's Powder River Basin coal corridor -Zeigler's Buckskin on the north and Kennecott's Antelope on the south. In 1995, 241 million tons of subbituminous were extracted from this limited area, 99 percent of it hauled out by rail. Not nearly as limited was the area encompassed by the destination points of the flow - Georgia, Michigan, Texas, Oregon, even a modest amount to Europe. For the participating railroads, the rapid increase in this volume from a 30,000-ton trickle in 1972 to the current avalanche has been a traffic surge second only to the growth of intermodal. The bottom-line impact of such profitable business is immense for the chief beneficiaries, and significant for many lesser players.
If you're in close touch with the railroad industry, this huge upwelling of carloadings is very apt to get your attention, especially since it occurred in an area previously a nonstarter traffic-wise. After a career in railroading, I began hearing from former associates who were either directly involved with Powder River Basin coal or were dispatched to see how BN and CNW handled their 800-pound gorilla. People would say, "You ought to go out for a look." Years of tending other irons in the fire intervened, but finally in June of 1995 I went. Just two weeks of exposure were more than enough to create a fixation. Result: another two-week visit that September, two similar trips in 1996, and a week for updating in June of 1997. In time, I became educated on the operation. Tours of mines and visits to power plant sites helped, as did countless contacts with personnel in the railroad, coal, and utility industries. In retrospect, I am glad my familiarity course was delayed, because from 1992 through 1995 the rate of production zoomed in the SPRB (for "Southern Powder River Basin" - the part in Wyoming). The graph which follows highlights that development. One result was that 1994 was a year of serious gridlock on the BN and CNW, with some carryover into 1995. There simply wasn't enough capacity built in to handle the load.
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