Ziebarth tells Trains News Wire freight service hasn’t operated in two years. “Effectively, the BNSF cut us off, they surcharged stuff that was coming in, and then the principal commodities we handled such as pipe and building material collapsed” Ziebarth says, due to the recession. “We’ve now had four years where there has been very little activity. The other business we had was beer and BNSF took that away from us about three or four years ago. It’s not a particularly happy situation,” he says.
As far as the passenger business is concerned, “It’s an excursion business without a steam engine,” he says. “You lose money on that. You can’t make money without a steam engine, and we have no facilities for that. Traditionally we were able to support the excursion business with other activities, but bit by bit the freight’s gone, some asset transactions we could use to fund the deficits have gone, so at the end of the day we could not fund operations.”
Ziebarth says the railroad is hoping to restart passenger operations in May. “But that’s not a promise,” he says.
