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The Oil Trains Coming through

Another post I'd forgotten to publish!

The Trains, the trains!
Where we live in rural North Idaho is a main railroad line in several directions, and being so, trains go by quite often. This train traffic has markedly increased over last few months with both coal and oil being transported from points east to the shipping ports far west in the Seattle area.
The oil coming through is the main concern to a lot of people throughout the North West. Oil coming from the shale fields of the Dakotas is the concern due to so many recent derailment and explosion accidents in the Midwest and back East.
It was recently said on the local NPR station that the, over 1 mile long oil trains, carry approximately 60,000 gallons of crude oil as those trains go lumbering through, with full trains going West, empty oil cars going back East for refills.
And this is many times a day in a 24 hour day and seven days a week.
The last 2 weeks I kept track of the daily trains during my hours at work, 8 to 5 Monday to Friday. It came to a total average of 13 trains a day, just during those hours! The low was 11 trains a few days the high was 18 trains on one Tuesday.

We were recently told that there is supposed to be an average of 40 trains a day coming through in that whole 24 hour day timeframe. Even though our house is about 4 miles from the Northbound / Southbound tracks, you can easily hear the trains going through the valley during the quiet of the night with their horn blasts at every crossing and low frequency rumble and vibrations from the engines and the weight of the rail cars.

There have been several community meetings on the train issue in the area. Stacy and I were at two recent civic meetings where trains were brought up in the meetings itineraries. Where I'm sitting right now as I type this is about 100 or so yards from the main line of tracks. Every time a train goes by the entire room shakes, my monitor wiggles, my desk water globe gets shakes in the water from the vibrations, and the engineers almost always seem to blast the horn at the exact moment you're trying to hear something on the radio or talking on the phone.
The concern is the fact that for the city, tracks go by, in the span of a few yards away and not football fields or miles apart with the main emergency responders of the City Fire headquarters, the Sheriff department with the county communications center, jail and emergency response vehicles, all parked only feet from those tracks.


The photos above and below are of one of the numerous oil trains, a full load heading West. This train was 4 engines, 2 on each end and 102 loaded oil cars. This is the view from my office window of the tracks and trains, going each direction.


So should that predicted inevitable derailment occur, what could happen here? The river become polluted for miles into Canada from an oil spill, an explosion take out part or all of downtown Bonners Ferry?

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