Train grant request tuned to improve funding chances

Officials with the Port of Whitman County are almost ready to send off a more localized federal grant application to repair local railroad tracks.

The port is applying for more than $1 million in federal funding to rehabilitate state-owned railroads in Whitman County. The port’s grant request goes to the federal Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery program, an offshoot of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

Joe Poire, executive director for the port, said the repairs would be aimed at stabilizing bridges and upgrading rails on the track between the mainline connection at Marshall and the planned unit train loading facility being built by local grain companies at McCoy siding south of Rosalia off the P&L line.

Poire told port commissioners at their regular meeting last Thursday, Oct. 6, that the application was changed slightly to improve its odds for acceptance.

The first draft of the grant application included more than $3 million in funding requests to improve trackage on state-owned railroads in Whitman and Lincoln counties.

The port is part of the Palouse River and Coulee City Rail Authority, which formed in 2008 to oversee more than 300 miles of state-owned track in Whitman, Grant, Lincoln and Spokane counties.

Poire said the TIGER administrators are expecting as many as 4,000 transportation applications from counties across the nation.

“Well, we could always buy one of those speeder cars and get out and fix it up,” said Commissioner Dan Boone.

Lincoln County is seeking funding to upgrade its track to accommodate larger trains and repair several bridges on the 110-mile CW line from Cheney to Coulee City.

The funding would be used to repair structurally questionable bridges and replace the track with higher capacity steel. All that would be intended to better support the heavier 110-car unit trains.

Rosalia-based Cooperative Agricultural Producers earlier this year received the county’s approval to build a facility that would quickly load 110-car unit trains just north of McCoy siding, which is south of Rosalia on Highway 271.