Two major players competing for traffic in the viable transportation corridor that is the Columbia River Gorge momentarily roll past one another on the river's Washington banks at Dallesport in a side-by-side appearance made possible by some unbelievable luck. The 11,249 foot snow-capped peak of Mt. Hood looks down at eastbound garbage traversing amongst both rail and water as a 60-car H INBROO1 26A, fresh out of the siding following a meet with a Pasco to Longview freight, hustles above across their Fallbridge Subdivision while a much slower "Crown Point" tug monotonously shoves its short barge toward the locks at The Dalles Dam in this region's never-ending "Dash for Trash." BNSF collects garbage from all throughout the Pacific Northwest and parts of Canada via a handful of local jobs that shuttle the containers to yards at both Interbay and Everett where several of these unit trash trains per day are assembled for forwarding to a landfill at Republic Services in Roosevelt, WA. These moves closely resemble your normal intermodal trains, however with a rather distinct and unpleasant odor attached with them. Upon arrival, the containers are removed from their railcars and loaded onto trucks where rubber wheels bring the garbage its last few miles uphill to Republic's large dump site, which has the capacity for over 120 million tons of trash, fourth largest of its kind in the United States. Empties are then loaded back onto a waiting train and promptly sent back west to the cities for another load of stinky cargo. Union Pacific runs almost an identical operation of their own for Waste Management on the Oregon side of the river to and from a dump site near the town Arlington.
