Rail company wants to resume service in Palouse

PALOUSE — A railroad company wants to resume services through the city as early as July.

The City Council met with Washington Idaho and Montana Railway owners Feb. 13 to discuss resuming railway operations through the city along Whitman Street.

Company co-owner and project manager, Maddi Farnsworth, said she, General Manager Jason Hill and Senior Adviser John Howell started the railroad company in Northwestern Idaho. Now, they want to refurbish the railroad tracks here and start service moving lumber for Bennett Lumber Products, a family-owned company based in Princeton, Idaho.

According to the company website, Bennett Lumber owns approximately 70,000 acres of forest in North Idaho and Eastern Washington. It produces lumber at mills located in Princeton and Clarkston.

Bennett Lumber signed up with the railway company in February, Farnsworth said. That lumber would be moved to Palouse, where the Spokane Spangle and Palouse Railway would receive it and transport it to Spokane.

Union Pacific Railway would then move the lumber wherever it needs to go from Spokane, she said.

Bennett Lumber has been trucking its products to Clarkston but is working on agreements to use trains instead.

“The average equivalent of one rail car is about three truck loads,” Farnsworth said, adding that is roughly 15 trucks a week that the railway would take off the highways.

The tracks in Palouse are owned by the Washington state Department of Transportation, Farnsworth said, noting they were purchased in 2006. The Idaho rails are owned by Watco Corp.

Farnsworth said they are working with Bennet Lumber to refurbish tracks that haven’t been used since late 2018, when the previous company shut down service. So, they will lease the track and then run the trains.

It will then be up to the state and SSP to refurbish the rails in Palouse.

“SSP is the only way for rail traffic to get in or out of our railroad,” Farnsworth said, noting the project comes down to getting interchange agreement between railroad companies. “How we’re going to exchange is still a work in progress.”