Western Milling owns and operates three unit train receiving
facilities throughout the California San Joaquin Valley in order to
continually provide optimal nutrition to the largest dairy herd in
the U.S. In 2017 the company upgraded its locomotive power to
highest rated Tier 4 units at all three locations and phased out
diesel engines that had been in operation for over 50 years.
California is an 85% grain deficit state that relies on the
continuous delivery of agricultural commodities via rail to
manufacture livestock feed. Receiving facilities have worked
closely with the Class 1 railroads for decades to develop an
efficient system for unloading grains in a just-in-time
model. This system generally works well however weather
events, labor shortages, equipment or track failures can cause
disruption to the rail network which often leads to impacts at the
Receiving facility.
Western Milling is not at all opposed to working in earnest
to improve the air quality in the San Joaquin Valley for the
betterment of our employees, our communities and future
generations. Our concern with the requirement for net-zero
emission by 2035 stems from the need to process hundreds of rail
cars on a continuous basis. Receiving windows can often range
from 3 to 5 days but sometimes expand to 10 to 14 days when the
rail network is stressed, this can lead to multiple trains arriving
at the same time. Western Milling facilities are designed and
staffed to unload one unit train at a time and are heavily reliant
on dependable locomotive power to process over one hundred cars
efficiently. This is currently possible with the Tier 4
locomotive units in place allowing us to process multiple trains in
succession. However, we have concerns that electric power
units (either shuttles or locomotives, none of which are
commercially available today) and their need for down time to
charge would drastically increase our need for greater capital
expenditure possibly doubling our need for horsepower. In
instances where a Receiver could not unload a unit train during
established windows of time, financial penalties (demurrage) would
be levied by the Class 1 railroads negatively impacting Western
Milling business operations in California.
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