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[quote user="kenneo"] I think BN's prime directive is to dumb down and/or eliminate any possible operating complexity.  I know that if I was an operating officer or dispatcher  and was faced with a road freight stopping to unload - let alone sort and unload - anything, I would be in orbit when faced with the traffic density on that line.  I would barely agree to letting a train make a set out and pick up of a blocked cut - that would take about 1 hour when you consider all of the parts of the delay.  Doing the transload at Wenatchee is a much better deal.  All trains stop there for crews, and unless the train is making a rolling crew change, you already have lost about 2 hours to delay there.  Second best, from the BNSF's point of view, would be to operate a Wenatchee-Quincy turn to take the cars off the westbound train to Quincy and then bring the westbound loads back to Wenatchee.  Probably, there could be eastbound loads originating at Quincy, too.  But BN won't foot the bill - the cold storage outfit will need to pay for the local, unloading, sorting, loading, and transportation billing.Last "problem" here is refrigerated equipment.  Rare in surface international container service.  Them frozens will require them.  And don't expect the BNSF to operate a separate train from "Seattle" to Quincy.  Remember the traffic capacity issue at Cascade Tunnel.And if the BNSF doesn't want to cooperate in any fashion, the UP is (currently) of the frame of mind to cooperate if you can get the trailers down to Yakima.[/quote]Problem with that last sentence is that UP's traffic out of Yakima is handled by BNSF on a haulage agreement down to the Tri-Cities or Wallowa, and frankly getting from the Quincy area to Yakima is no picnic for truck drivers.  Time constraints would probably nix that.  Might as well just drive on west to Seattle!You're probably right regarding BNSF's ultimate desire to be nothing more than an exclusively transcon railroad.  And that's the problem with allowing a partially deregulated/massively consolidated rail industry to call the shots via continued closed access - It's the intermediate domestic customers that lose out on getting decent rail service, and the closed access aspects of a vertically integrated monopoly prevents those willing 3rd party rail service providers from picking up the rejected business.Obviously, Linda Morgan et al have no idea of the monster they created.
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