With recent issues around the transportation of oil via rail, the US DOT has been upgrading tank car standards to compensate.
This is creating a bumper crop of excess legacy tank cars with nothing to haul. Too unsafe for Bakken oil, someone has taken a need and found a new use. Water.
Per Trains:
Water Train promoters thirsty for business
http://trn.trains.com/news/news-wire/2015/10/15-water-train (http://trn.trains.com/news/news-wire/2015/10/15-water-train)
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California relies on rail to get produce to market, but would farmers pony up to bring trainloads of water to drought-parched fields and orchards?
Water Train Inc. is betting they are and is actively looking for partners in a test train to find out.
"Given the extreme measures some are taking in terms of extraction and a finite water supply, we feel the time is right to explore this option," Water Train President David Rangel said when the project was announced in late August. While there's been much talk of building pipelines from distant rivers and lakes to take water to farmers, those projects take years to plan and build, he said.
"The Water Train is ready now," Rangel says.
Weeks later, a Water Train spokesperson tells Trains News Wire the company will refrain from speaking more about the project as it solicits public and private partners for a test train capable of hauling 190,000 gallons. The company says for actual service it has a fleet of more than 300 cars capable of delivering 154 million gallons during a growing season or about 1.9 million gallons per 100-car unit train.
Farmers don't work in gallons, however. They talk in acre-feet, the volume of water needed to cover one acre to a depth of 1 foot. An acre-foot is 325,851 gallons, so 154 million gallons equals slightly more than 470 acre-feet.
"In the big picture that's a relatively small amount of water," says spokesman Dave Kranz of the California Farm Bureau Federation. "It would depend on all those logistical questions: How much is available at a time? How much would it cost? Where would it be coming from? Where would it be arriving?
One of those questions would be regulatory, Kranz says. Just moving water within the state triggers regulatory processes, and there likely would be added issues shifting water between states.
APWater
Rev. Robert Williams of Detroit delivers 16 pallets of bottled water to drought victims in the East Porterville, Calif., Oct. 2 at Iglesia Emmanuel Church. If groups will donate money and time to send truck loads of water over roads, will they be interested in moving train loads even more efficiently?
Chieko Hara/The Porterville Recorder via AP
Historically, railroads have hauled water around the West for everything from firefighting to filling steam-era tanks at remote desert stations. The Santa Fe Railway even kept hotels and other services at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon supplied with water in the early decades after it became a rail-served tourist destination.
Water Train is a subsidiary of Modoc Railroad of Marion, Ill., owner of the Modoc Railroad Academy and billed as the only training railroad for new conductors and locomotive engineers in the country. The company has not said where it will get water other than from a source east of the Mississippi River approved by the Environmental Protection Agency for use in agriculture or groundwater recharge.
Invitations to participate in the test train were to be sent to several cities in California's Central Valley as well as large water users, according to the company's announcement.
Irrigated agriculture accounts for about 60 percent of water usage in California according to the U.S. Geologic Survey. The state, which produces nearly half of U.S.-grown fruits, nuts, and vegetables, is currently in a declared drought emergency after years of poor snow runoff, shrinking reservoirs, and dropping water tables.
The most likely car for the new water service would be the ones talked about so much in crude oil service: DOT-111 cars. After cleaned and certified safe for water use, the cars would carry about 19,000 gallons of water per car, according to Water Train. That's about two-thirds the volume of a 30,000-gallon capacity DOT-111 car, but keeps the car within axle loading limits.
That leaves unanswered the question of whether farmers or cities would pay enough for water to cover rail operations and other expenses. Kranz says he's heard of extreme cases where farmers in crisis paid as much as $2,000 an acre-foot to keep orchards alive.
"The economics is likely to preclude the idea before regulatory problems," Dr. Jay R. Lund, Director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at University of California, Davis, says in an email to Trains News Wire, "The value of additional water in California during the drought is about $1000 per acre-foot, but is more like $300 per acre-foot or less in normal years."
It would take 18 tank cars each carrying 19,000 gallons of water loaded as Water Train wants to, to deliver one acre-foot. Assuming free water at a source, each car would have to be delivered at about $55 each during emergencies or $16 during normal times.
Still, it's not known how much growers might pay to stay in business, or what rail-hauled water might do to consumer prices. There is, of course, the standard dictum in the arid West that water runs uphill to money.
"Think of the Water Train as a giant water hose, able to be moved around to where water is needed today," Rangel says. "While not a replacement for surface or subterranean sources, the Water Train does represent a business-sustaining option."
In the early 1900's they used cypress tank water cars to deliver water to Key West, so the idea has been used before. This is a new twist on a old idea.