About Our Railroad and Family
"We came, We saw, We Railroaded!"
~ ~ ~
Come hell or high water, we're here to run a railroad.
EWG Railroad operates the Washington State-owned Central Washington Subdivision or CW Branch of the State’s 297-mile Palouse River and Coulee City Rail System. A network of Class One spinoffs eventually acquired by the State between 2004 and 2007 which includes the CW Branch; the P&L Branch and WIM operated by the Washington & Idaho Railroad and the PV Hooper by Watco.
What’s left of the CW is 108 miles of hastily-built (1888-1890) railroad of Northern Pacific, Burlington Northern, and BNSF Railway pedigree spiked west in a shallow rising topographical arch from its BNSF connection at Cheney, WA., terminating in Coulee City, WA. Its trajectory bifurcates three of Washington's biggest, most bountiful counties in the heart of the Evergreen State’s Breadbasket, aka Big Bend Country. Eponymic of the five-county region nestled in the armpit of the Columbia River’s northernmost southward bend this side of the 49th parallel in northcentral Washington, serendipitously lying in the rain shadow of the Cascades.
A product of coldblooded egotistical vision, Northern Pacific’s fanatical propaganda machine, masters of hyperbole and hubris preached the land of milk and honey and fortune into the futile minds of immigrants; like colporteurs, they spread their tracts of a promised land along its lines, the CW notwithstanding. Build it, and they will come. They did. And, they came. Under the unforgiving Eastern Washington sun and stone-cold winters.
Today, the CW is home to and run by a handful of hardened railroaders and an unlikely quartet of equally seasoned six-motor locomotives doing the heavy lifting of grains, of gold in steel-wheeled vessels. No, not the kind that bejewel, but feed the world, literally.
However, in its more recent tumultuous past, the CW struggled. Mightily. In 1998, Watco deemed the line unprofitable within a decade of acquiring it from BNSF. Grain traffic alone proved unsustainable for Watco as the owner-operator of the CW. Coupled with scrap steel at a premium made it a prime candidate for dismantling. Fortunately, rail-dependent wheat growers successfully lobbied the State into purchasing the CW in 2007, finding itself the reluctant owner of a deteriorating knot of grainer lines in the sunset of their life expectancy. Enter the EWG Railroad, a startup selected by the State, poised to write a new chapter in the annals of the storied CW.
Here we stand; here we will build, a railroad.
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”