I'm beginning to wonder about all this track work slowing traffic from Minot to Grand Forks. Seems like much more than the Devil's Lake track lift job.
Is the BNSF's new owner wanting to make the MOT - GFK a viable freight alternative? Either to relieve the main line Fargo - Minot for doing serious upgrades on that route next season. And/or to develop an alternate route for the crude trains to go to Duluth or up into Canada?
Just speculating - but Warren bought the BNSF for some reason. Surely the Bakken oil traffic was part of the calculation.
No doubt the BNSF is spending much money on the track work that delays the EB (and their own trains)
And wondering how the (nobody knows) plans of the BNSF might affect Amtrak's EB.
Track upgrades -- good. More traffic - bad. In any case waiting out the track work and delays is bad for Amtrak pax on the EB route.
I have read through most of this thread, but not everything, so I apologize in advance if too much of this is repetitive.
BNSF neglected the Minot-Grand Forks-Fargo route for a long, long time, probably because, with the exception of Amtrak, nothing of particularly high priority has regularly run over this segment for years. The substandard condition of the track should have been apparent to alert Amtrak riders well before the much-publicized flooding problems near Churchs Ferry, what with all of the jointed rail that was still in place on the Devils Lake line and the overall bumpier ride that has long been noticeable even on the newer welded rail from Fargo to Grand Forks to Minot. The condition of the track finally caught up to BNSF, forcing them to undertake the vigorous construction that has gone on this year. However, in some ways we should be thankful the delays that the
Empire Builder has had to contend with have not been even worse. Grain shipments on the BNSF network are down more than 11% year-to-date (see BNSF carload reports
here), and since this is rather significant commodity shipped over the route of the
Empire Builder, the net number of trains on the tracks in North Dakota has not gone up as much as might be expected given the increased number of crude oil trains.
Going back through history, cycles of neglect followed by renewal and prospects of greater worth in the future are pretty common when discussing the Devils Lake line. For all I know, this process could extend back a century to when the Great Northern decided to build the Surrey Cutoff and make that a part of the transcontinental main, relegating the original alignment through Hillsboro and Devils Lake to a more secondary status with a bigger focus on serving the numerous branch lines that radiated like a vine off of the main.
Anyway, we're obviously in a renewal phase with regard to this line at the present time. The latest plan as far as freight traffic is concerned is to, at some point in the future, get the unions to agree to "run-through" Grand Forks and establish a single crew territory from Minot to Fargo (or Dilworth, MN, site of the primary yard in the Fargo-Moorhead area). This would eliminate the crew change that is now necessary at Grand Forks and mean that only one crew would be required no matter if a train took the Fargo-Minot route by way of New Rockford or by way of Devils Lake. Obviously, as an ultimate consequence, BNSF would basically gain a second main line between Fargo and Minot without having to build a second line mostly from scratch.
To facilitate upgrading the Devils Lake and Hillsboro lines to a secondary main line, a lot of work on sidings will need to be done. Even though the route had numerous sidings befitting a major corridor when built, over the years many were removed from service and several of the remaining ones are not long enough to accommodate contemporary freight trains. On top of this, they still have hand-operated switches, ensuring that meets are about as slow and tedious as possible. Fixing these problems will require time and money, but BNSF is currently talking up the prospects of installing at least 10 long sidings with automatic switches to more efficiently move traffic. Several other BNSF lines have gotten similar treatments in the past, with the most recent analog in the region probably being the Marshall Subdivision, which runs from Willmar, MN to Sioux City, IA. Increased coal, ethanol, and grain traffic in the last decade necessitated fitting many of the sidings on that otherwise "dark" line with automatic switches that can be controlled remotely by the train dispatcher.
Under such changes, the makeup of the traffic on the Devils Lake line probably would not change much from the present day; there would just be more traffic overall. By and large, grain, merchandise, and some lower-priority intermodal would dominate. For the most part, crude oil is not moved on the line presently, and is not expected to be in great numbers in the future, but the future as far as crude-by-rail is concerned can, and likely will, change on a dime. In any event, no crude trains currently go to Duluth-Superior or to Canada by way of BNSF tracks in Minnesota. Crude oil trains have made their way onto the tracks in this region from time to time, however. Typically they are sets of empty cars looking for a place to be put in storage for a while until one of the loading sites farther to the west can take them or one of the destination sites needs them. A couple shortlines in northwest Minnesota that connect with the BNSF network have made out well simply by providing a place to park crude oil tank cars when they are unneeded. The shortlines take in revenue, and BNSF temporarily gets unused cars out of the way.
Now will all of these changes to the Devils Lake and Hillsboro lines come to pass? They may or may not. As mentioned, previous prospects of using this track for bigger and better purposes have been put forward in the past only to largely fail to materialize.
The spectacular rise of shipping crude oil by rail certainly adds a new dimension to what may happen to the line, but this traffic is not guaranteed to keep growing or exist at the present level forever. Namely, the threat of pipelines being built to transport more and more oil out of North Dakota probably looms the largest, but is subject to what occurs with two of the benchmark prices of oil - WTI and Brent - and what the producers feel will yield them the largest profits.
Speaking of the price of oil, the theme in most of the popular media is that "technology" alone made the advance in oil production in North Dakota possible. That's not necessarily untrue, but by far the bigger factor has been the elevated price of oil the world has seen for almost a decade. When prices started quickly rising and looked to stay high for years, geologists and petroleum engineers got an incentive to dig through archived files looking at regions like the Bakken/Three Forks that were known or thought to have significant oil resources, but could only be produced profitably with higher crude oil prices. As a consequence, any strong downward trends in the price of oil would slow drilling down. If prices fell to a certain level, drilling would become nearly completely uneconomical and would have to be curtailed in order to avoid bankrupting the producers. As far as crude-by-rail is concerned, even if such a drop in prices happened for a brief time, shipments would likely still be adversely affected, since in the absence of any new drilling and frac'ing, the hyperbolic decline rates exhibited by tight oil wells such as those in the Bakken/Three Forks would cause total oil production to quickly go into a rapid descent. For more on the decline rates of Bakken/Three Forks wells, see
this (page 29),
this, and
this.
