Something I’ve always wondered about-what happens when I need my cars back that are parked about 3 miles deep?
Indeed. Plus, the burned bridge is not that big. Photos of the railroad bridge, the adjacent highway bridge that burned and the rest of the destruction in the community at:
Very small indeed. They’ll probably just bulldoze the charred remains off to the side, drop in a culvert or two and fill it in.
Here’s a video from the Billings Gazette:
True, for the most part, but it really depends on the railroad in question. In this case, the cars are stored at a point starting 47 miles from the interchange station (Moccasin), traversing four long, high trestles and a tunnel, which would be a lot of railroad to maintain simply for car storage. But the state owns it, and deems it in its best interest to keep, so might as well get some money with car storage. There are some auxiliary tracks between Denton and Moccasin where cars are stored, but none with the length of the main track west of Denton, obviously. Denton is the base of operation and the Chew-Choo tourist train operates east between Denton and Kingston, so that part of the main track is not available for car storage. The current main track car storage is west of Denton toward Arrow Creek, about 10 miles. The track continues another 30 miles beyond Arrow Creek to Geraldine, but is out of service due to a slide between Arrow Creek and Pownal, and beyond Pownal, the subgrade is very unstable (even the parallel highway is speed-restricted) and has noticeable slip-outs due to lack of any maintenance.
So, it is logical to conclude that it’s not worth maintaining the railroad beyond Arrow Creek because there’s no business, and it
A local short line encountered exactly that problem, resulting in a revised contract the next year that specified “last in, first out.”
In my experience, stored cars on a given line are usually all of the same type (in this case LP tankers), so that works.
The demand for LP is cyclical, so we see the long lines of tank cars arrive each spring. I’m pretty sure they’re all gone now.