Now for some strange reason the Army Corp. have this thing about building and operating waterways and big dams but wont do anything about building railroads.(Except the Alaska Railroad)
As you can see from the map above the Powder River basin already has a excellent system of rivers that could have locks and be canalized. Sure Barges are slow and the dams would make enviro mentals scream murder but so would building a railroad. (1 barge is the equlivent of 15 railroad cars BTW.)
Perhaps after all this is what the feds have up there sleave after all and thats why they dont want to fund the railroad
There’s really not enough water flowing in any of the PRB rivers to justify a slackwater system of dams and locks.
The reason the USACE dams on the Columbia and Snake River systems in the Pacific Northwest work so well is that they are significant producers of electricity, and as such have virtually paid for themselves and them some. In other words, the cost of building and maintaining the 14’ draft waterway from Portland to Lewiston ID (including all that phony "salmon recovery crap-o-rama) is more than covered by the generation of electricity at those dams. The same can’t be said for the Mississippi/Missouri River locks and dams, although with modern technologies they could produce enough marginal generation to help pay for their construction and maintenance.
As far as those rivers that have enough waterflow to justify conversion to navigation waterways, you could conceivably convert the Missouri river through the Dakotas all the way to Great Falls MT, maybe the Yellowstone to Billings, but no way could you convert the Powder River to a navigation waterway.
In other words, the railroads have nothing to fear from the USACE.
In the wetest year, I could walk through the Powder River and probably not get my knees wet. In an average year, all the creeks dry up, and the soil is powder-literally.