Highline shuttle facility in Four Lakes nears start-up

All the parts are nearly in place for Highline Grain's shuttle facility in Four Lakes and the $30 million project will begin accepting and shipping grain soon.

"We have a tentative target date for substantial completion, which is not finished but is finished enough to where we can move grain into it, that's Feb. 26," Keith Bailey, general manager and CEO of Ag Ventures and the operations officer for Highline Grain said.

A string of rail cars has been staged for about three weeks on the tracks that ring the elevator complex just north of Interstate 90 and are awaiting the OK to load when final inspections are complete

The elevators are enclosed by two tracks, the inner for the shuttle trains that will be both loaded for export and received from the growers. The outer loop is used for what are called "scoots," the trains that bring grain into the facility from the western parts of the rail line, Bailey said.

How the Highline terminal will receive its grain, and how much it processes is largely dependent on the crop year, Bailey explained.

"This year it could be 11 (or) 12 million bushels," Bailey said. "If we had shipped the whole year - we're going to be headed into the new crop year - it's going to be a bigger harvest than we've had in the past and we think we'll see anywhere from 14 to 15 million bushels a year," that come in via rail.

That's not counting an as yet undetermined amount of business from Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), which contracted specifically with Highline to accept their proprietary shipments. Any local business is on top of that.

The initial shipments will be the remaining wheat that farmers did not sell after last fall's harvest, hoping, perhaps, to realize better pricing of the commodity.

"Normally 70-80 percent of the previous crop is purchased by Christmastime," Bailey said. Things are behind that number due to low grain prices, Bailey said.

Checking the price for soft white wheat in Reardan, Bailey found it at $4.37 per bushel on Feb. 5. While every farmer is different the general break-even price is $5-6, Bailey said.

When it does get rolling, rail cars, which hold about 3,750 bushels each, will be unloaded at 21 cars an hour, and loaded at the rate of 6-7 minutes.

By comparison a truck holds up to 1,150 bushels. "We generally feel you're getting three truckloads per rail car," Bailey said, adding the railroad is taking a significant number of trucks off the road.

The railroad allows Highline a specific amount of time to load the cars. "If we meet those time limits there's some incentives provided to us to help us accomplish our financial goals," Bailey said.

The terminal could have been located in a variety of places across Eastern Washington, Bailey said. But in the end it was all about location.

Highline studied several locations but settled on Four Lakes because it utilized the tracks of the Eastern Washington Gateway Railroad. And it had other attractive amenities.

They started looking for a location near where they had facilities along the mainline of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe.

"What we did is looked around and we said, 'OK, if we don't use the short line the state owns any more we would be relegated to trucks and the freight rates would go up 15-18 cents per bushel to our growers,'" Bailey explained. "That's a fairly large cost."

Logistically the location was close enough to Cheney to access the BNSF's mainline and it will potentially save both congestion, plus wear and tear on area roads.

"It keeps a bunch of trucks off the roads that would have been beating them up out in the country," Bailey said. That saved both county and state taxpayers money for road repairs.

Paul Delaney can be reached at pdelaney@cheneyfreepress.com.