By PAUL DELANEY
Staff Reporter
If only all the trains that end up using the new Geiger Spur will be as timely.
Work on the new connector line that joins industrial trackage along McFarlane Road that once needed access to and through Fairchild Air Force Base to the mainline, was completed on time and on budget according to officials at both the Washington State Deptartment of Transportation and Spokane County.
WSDOT's deputy state rail and marine director Andrew Wood said construction began in June on the five miles of track that will cross SR-902 just west of Craig Road and join track operated by the Eastern Washington Gateway Railroad near the Medical Lake-Four Lakes Road.
“The project that has been on the books for a little while,” Wood said from his Olympia office, indicating it first came onto radar screens in 2005 in fact. It was mandated by Fairchild's demand to remove track from the north side of the base property along Highway 2.
The state-owned rail line was first informed in 2006 that they would have to move the line. Engineering and environmental work took place in 2007. The county started purchasing land to build the track at the end of 2007 and beginning of 2008.
“They just wrapped up the work last week (Nov. 24),” Wood said. Outside of federal inspections – which the line should pass based on some preliminary test runs by a locomotive – the track is expected to be fully operational and running trains by Jan. 2, Wood indicated. “The Air Force made a stipulation that we were off the base by October of 2009,” Wood said. “We'll be beating that by almost a year.
The operator of the line is going to be Eastern Washington Gateway, the same line that runs periodic trains through Cheney.
Wood was on hand when the first locomotive was run along the new track. Officials were making sure all signals were operating properly. “Obviously we don't want to have the Federal Railroad Administration sending an inspector out and find they fail it,” Wood said.
H & H engineering of California won the bid for the track construction, according to Wood. “When we first got the schedule from them the date they gave us was Nov. 24,” he said. “We were pretty confident we would finish by the end of the year. They finished just about flat bang on the day they said they were going to finish.”
So did the unique geology – a.k.a. the thick basalt rock that sits in many instances just below the surface of the West Plains – present any problems to construction? “The only thing I know is that some of the earthwork and some of the rock formations they came across took a little bit longer to clear than had been anticipated,” Wood said. “Other areas all went well.”
Wood likes the finished product. “If you take a look you'll see it's a very nice piece of track and although it's engineered for 25 miles-per-hour running – it's all we're allowed to do – it's in very good condition and you could actually run faster on that track if you wanted to.” The spur is expected to prod further business development across the West Plains, giving companies better access to markets via rail. Several spurs peel off the line along McFarlane Road.
Next up is locating and building a trans-loader facility on an approved site south of McFarlane and west of Craig
The project is not funded yet, but if and when it is, it promises to attract people that are only occasional rail shippers to become regular users of the line.“This could completely revitalize the area of Airway Heights for rail traffic,” Wood said.
Assistant county engineer, Chad Coles confirmed all of what Wood said about construction and the successful completion of the line before deadline.
He seemed especially happy with how the crossing of SR-902 was handled.
“We added those pull-out lanes so it gave us some flexibility to get in there to do it half at a time and keep traffic open,” Coles said. “I think we only shut down traffic only a total of two hours, and that was for a special weld right there at the crossing, and it wasn't all at once.”
Coles added a little more light to what a trans-loader is all about. “They look like a whole bunch of different things, it just depends what you're taking off the train and what you're putting on the train,” he said.
Essentially trans-loaders enable shippers to take whatever is being shipped and put it on truck to distribute locally. Or visa-versa and allow goods to be shipped outside.
Current examples of trans-loaders can be found in the Spokane Valley at the Industrial Park where cement is off-loaded. Coles said that Dealer's Auto Auction takes their cars to a facility off Trent in the Spokane Valley near Thierman Road to be shipped.
Paul Delaney can be reached at [email protected]
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