Wednesday, December 31, 2008
BNSF Sells Line to Port of Vancouver
The Port of Vancouver is enticing new business, and BNSF is going to help them with a sweet deal that was signed earlier this month. The Port will be adding multiple acres and several miles of track, thanks to a right-of-way sale and a big donation from BNSF to complete a slated program by 2017.
Details on the sale in this link.
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Read this latest attempt to breath new life into the Ports of Vancouver – Portland. The Port of Vancouver has hundreds of undeveloped acres, and I find it interesting that they are tweaking the development plan with this latest venture with BN.
ReplyDeleteThe achelies heel to both Ports of Vancouver and Portland is the mighty Columbia River, which both tout as being their “important link to the Far East!”
Routing vessels via the Columbia River is both expensive and dangerous.
Unlike transiting to the Port of Prince Rupert, which requires but a single Harbor Pilot over a relatively short distance – less than 50 miles, transiting to the Ports of Portland - Vancouver, requires two pilots – a Columbia River Bar Pilot, to bring the vessel from near offshore across the infamous Columbia River Bar, and a Columbia River Pilot to navigate a vessel 100 plus river miles to the Ports of Portland – Vancouver. Pilots are exchanged on the fly as the vessel transits past the Port of Astoria.
And then there are the limitations of the river itself. The 100 miles from Astoria to Portland/Vancouver are as treacherous and dangerous as any river based water way. The channel is long, narrow, and tricky with more than 100 – closer to 200 - course changes. Spring freshets cause havoc with elevated river levels and rapid currents, and fall slack water gives the navigator no margin for error to stay in that channel.
Having spent many years boating on that river, I know from experience that down bound traffic is the most dangerous to encounter, as a ship must travel faster than the river current to maintain steerage across her rudder!
The on going expense of dredging of the Columbia River channel and the environmental nightmare that that process engenders! The act of dredging not only destroys the marine environment, but also creates a huge problem of where to dump the dredging, which also creates an environmental nightmare!
Years ago, Portland began loosing shipping because the Port could not accommodate new generation of wider deep draft container ships, which are forced to arrive and leave with partial rather than full loads.
And competition away from the Columbia River ports is already brutal. One only needs to sit alongside I-5 corridor and watch the container trains and bomb carts containers scurrying up and down between the Puget Sound and Columbia River ports.
The solution lies in rather than throwing good money after bad (and BNSF has nothing to loose if this endeavourer fails) trying to maintain container ports, is to invest those monies not in Portland, and certainly not in Vancouver - still struggling with the infamous I-5 bridge bottleneck - but that monies be diverted to the Port of Astoria as the port of choice on the Columbia River.
There is plenty of space at Tongue Point for creation of a well-designed container port, and the “rights of way” have already been shot and aligned as the former Spokane, Portland and Seattle Railway. Indeed, up to a few years ago, the roadbed was the route of the Budd car tourist train between Portland and Astoria.
The existing roadbed could be rapidly upgraded for heavy steel, while a second track could be brought into service as the new Port of Astoria brings itself on line and shippers get used to the new and improved traffic alignments.
It would be analogous to the big trench between Terminal Island and the rest of the world!
The cost of the river pilot and the 200 plus round trip miles of dangerous transit and on-going struggle to keep the river dredged would all be eliminated!
Put a pencil to it!
I've always wondered why Port of Grays Harbor isn't bigger. After all, it's right on the Pacific Ocean! Am I missing something?
ReplyDeleteGood question, my man. As the former News Director at KBKW Aberdeen back in the late '60's, I asked that question many a time of civic leaders, who had to crawl on hands and knees to Mt. Olympia, just to get enough money to keep the Port dredged! Again, only a short bar pilot run would be required to gain access to the Orient, and the NP line could easily be upgraded, just as the SP&S to the south. Heck, the Port of Raymond is almost a muddied memory, and Grays Harbor is struggling to keep the existing infrastructure dredged! Mt. Olympia is where the power be, keeping Seattle-Tacoma happy and busy!
ReplyDeleteI've always seen Grays Harbor County as an untapped resource, languishing for whatever reason but in such a perfect spot for so many things. Seems to me that being so close to shipping lanes and right on the Pacific would give it an advantage if the infrastructure was there.
ReplyDelete