"Westbound Trains To Willmar Could Be Going In Either Direction" -- Memo To Minnesota Activists -- January 9, 2016

First, the link to the DOT-111 wiki page: "and a maximum capacity of 34,500 US gallons" although 25,000 gallons is probably a good "rule-of-thumb" number to use for Bakken crude if one wants to be extraordinarily conservative when doing back-of-envelope calculations. Also, "25" is easier to deal with than "34."

750 bbls x 24 gallons/bbl = 31,500 gallons.

Now, the excerpt from a StarTribune article:

Overall, the report said, 28 to 48 oil trains pass through Minnesota each week, unchanged since last spring. Each train carries 1 million gallons of Bakken crude oil or more. 

Doing the math, 1 million gallons/25,000 gallons = 40 DOT-111 tank cars.

Unit trains leaving the Bakken were often 100 cars in length, and BNSF routinely has 118-car unit trains (grain, coal, oil, freight). I don't know how many cars there are now in a typical BNSF unit train leaving the Bakken.

Whew! That's out of the way.

The linked StarTribune article reports that BNSF has completed their upgrades, and that highly-explosive Bakken oil that once went through the heart of the Twin Cities has now been re-routed back to the usual routes northeast of the cities:

Most of the North Dakota crude oil trains crossing Minnesota no longer pass through west metro suburbs and downtown Minneapolis.

BNSF Railway, the largest Bakken oil hauler, notified Minnesota officials in December that it has shifted crude-by-rail traffic back to its usual route via Detroit Lakes, St. Cloud, Anoka and northeast Minneapolis. 

The shift had been expected; with the end of construction season, traffic is back to more traditional routes.

Whew! I'm glad that's over. Talk about a non-story after all that Dayton noise earlier this year. 

Over the summer, as BNSF worked on a $326 million system upgrade in Minnesota, it shifted most oil trains — about 11 to 23 per week — to tracks through Willmar, Dassel, Delano, Wayzata and St. Louis Park. This sent trains through the downtown, past Target Field and across Nicollet Island, worrying some local and state officials, including Gov. Mark Dayton.

This may be the most important data point for activists:

Although the report says those trains are “westbound to Willmar,” BNSF spokeswoman Amy McBeth said they could be going in either direction.

When demonstrating, it's important that activists don't get on the track facing only one direction; they could get hit by a unit train coming the other way.