Serving Whitman County since 1877
Serving Whitman County since 1877
Palouse train car
It was named “The Oleander.” It began as a sleeper car on a railroad that once ran freight and passenger trains to the tip of the Florida Keys.
Today, the 1948 former Florida-East Coast Railway car is stored on tracks at the edge of Palouse.
It’s the only passenger car along a stretch of other rail cars stored on the inert tracks.
How it got there is part of a revenue source for the Washington and Idaho Railroad, which leases 126 miles of tracks from the state of Washington, Idaho and the McGregor Company.
For about $3 a day, a rail company or private owner may store a car along the line.
“If it’s a flat car, maybe it’s a dollar a day, but a loaded car of chlorine could be $100 a day,” said Stan Patterson, President of the Washington and Idaho Railroad.
The line began storing cars in 2006 when it bought the tracks from Watco Transportation Service of Pittsburg, Kan., a company that owns railroads in 24 states and Australia.
It was November and in the rail business, that meant the Christmas rush was over.
“It takes two months to get across the country,” said Patterson. “In Christmas rush, you have to stop loading rail cars by the first week of November.”
As a rail car moves cross country, it gets to its destination by waiting at each terminal for other cars going in the same direction. Once enough are assembled, they are connected and hauled to the next railroad terminal.
Oleander’s path
After the Oleander’s use in Florida, it was sold in 1962 to the Canadian National Railway and put in place as a sleeper car in passenger service. Afterwards, the car was rebuilt into a business car in the late ‘70s and renamed “Northwind.”
“Business cars are kind of like a private jet for a railroad,” said Matt Farnsworth of Moscow, a rail enthusiast who researched the car.
Later, when the Canadian National Railway (C.N.) sold its passenger cars to Via – the Amtrak of Canada – C.N. kept the “Northwind” to use as a maintenance-of-way (M.O.W.), which is a track geometry car that measures elements such as track height, banking in curves and how worn rails are. One-third of the car was converted as part of the first generation of computerized M.O.W. cars, following the transistor era.
“It was wires everywhere,” said Phil Sheridan of Novato, Calif., who now owns the former Northwind/Oleander.
Sheridan bought it in 1999 and as the car’s first private owner, had the track geometry equipment removed, leaving open space in the back end of the car. In the front, two sleeper rooms remain, along with the kitchen/bar area, a dining room with a table for six and a day room which can be converted for another sleeping room. The car also has a fully self-contained generator powered by the axels and fuel tank for a separate diesel generator.
As a business car in the Canadian National Railway, the open space inside had big tables to be used for meetings. Custom made, this type of railcar is shaped according to a buyer’s specifications as business cars are most often used for the president of a railroad to travel in. They can be identified by the porch area at one end – which is where Presidential candidates appear at whistle-stop tours by rail.
Sheridan bought the car in Montreal and took it to Vancouver, B.C., where it was used in a few Canadian television commercials for Target, as well as Russian television and movie productions, earning rental fees of $2,500 to $4,000 per day.
“Then it sat for more than a year. I didn’t get any calls on it, so I decided to bring it down to the U.S.,” said Sheridan.
He had it pulled to Marshal, Wash., leasing the car to the Washington and Idaho Railroad, which later moved it to Palouse.
Now it sits above the Palouse River across from Hayton Greene Park, tainted by graffiti on one side.
“It is a part of my fleet and I will, at some point, reactivate it,” Sheridan said.
When a rail car sits in track storage for a year or two, because each day costs the owner money, it becomes a candidate to be sold for re-purposing or to potentially be scrapped.
After 1974, railcars built in the U.S. are considered 50-year assets, by regulation of the Association of American Railroads. Earlier cars had shorter lifespans.
If a car that sat for awhile does get summoned, depending on where it is, it can be costly to move it.
If the car is amidst a long line of stored cars, it can be extracted at a significant cost. Usually, however, the first available car of the desired type in a storage line is used instead.
“Owners pay a much higher switch fee to cherry-pick one car,” said Todd Pollard, Director of Fleet Management for Watco.
If indeed they opt to do that, the whole line of cars is moved in order to get to a split in the tracks where the one car can be separated out.
The practice of storing railcars has existed essentially since the dawn of railroads, while there are more regulations now regarding fencing, lights and surveillance for those containing hazardous materials.
The one in Palouse
How many cars like the former Oleander are still on the rails?
“None. Not like that one,” Sheridan said, citing its stainless steel window bands, layout, interior wood and other features. “That’s a one-of-a-kind car. They never made those in batches. They made them one at a time.”
Sheridan’s interest in trains began early. His father gave him a Lionel train set as a boy, and he has owned cars and locomotives for the past 20 years.
“Slowly but surely I graduated to the real ones,” he said.
Sheridan, a fire protection contractor installing sprinkler systems, owns more than 40 train cars, with some leased for various purposes.
“I’m not going to do anything at a total loss,” he said. “I’ve got better things to do with money.”
Some of the revenue generated by Sheridan’s fleet includes renting business cars to groups as a mode of travel. For high rates, a party or organization can charter a car and have it attached to an Amtrak train to travel to whatever destination they would like.
Three of Sheridan’s cars run routes like this from Chicago to New Orleans three times per week. A company called Iowa-Pacific Holdings charters the cars for the Pullman Charter Service.
“They even get their shoes shined,” Sheridan said. “Like they used to do in the olden days.”
A 1927 business car of Sheridan’s, stored in California, has been chartered by Hugh Hefner to take him from Los Angeles to horse races in Santa Ana, Calif.
Now
Today Sheridan’s Palouse car is known as PPCX 15112, listed as part of a private train car ownership company.
“It’s like an LLC, for legal reasons and tracking in the national system, it’s recorded under this one company,” said Farnsworth.
Before the former Oleander came to Palouse, it sat in Marshall. The move to Palouse was part of the Washington and Idaho’s deal with Sheridan in which it stores the car free of charge if they can use it. The W&I uses it for a Santa Claus train event in Potlatch at Christmas time in which Santa arrives across the stateline, waving from the train car’s porch.
The car was built by the American Car Foundry and Company of St. Charles, Mo.
It’s model was a “6DBR Lounge ACF,” which referred to six double-bedrooms and one roomette, which had a bed, sink and toilet. ACF refers to the manufacturer.
“It’s seen a lot of hard use,” said Farnsworth. “I would not say it’s in good shape.”
Other cars stored next to it above the Palouse River include centerbeam flat cars, which are used to haul wallboard, lumber and other products. During the housing market crash in 2007-09, thousands of these cars went into track storage around the country.
“The market took a southbound turn and all these centerbeam cars were no longer needed,” said Pollard.
In 2007, the first year of car storage on the Washington and Idaho line, there were 35 miles worth of cars. Today there are about two miles.
“It’s just due to the economy,” Patterson said.
The rail owner is happy to have the cars when they can get them.
“It’s the only profitable thing we do is store cars,” Patterson said. “We don’t make money hauling freight.”
Patterson estimates that about 25 percent of the stored cars over the past eight years were tank cars from refineries near Seattle and Vancouver, B.C.
The Oleander/North-wind/PPCX 15112 is the only passenger car they have ever stored on the line.
Garth Meyer is a former Whitman County Gazette reporter.
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