1-17 IAN Trains and trucks

 Trains versus trucks for hauling potatoes.

 Guys who are my age can certainly remember the days when you’d hear a lonesome train whistle out on the prairie. I remember when I heard the whistle off in the distance I’d try and rush down to the tracks. In many ways trains have been replaced by modern-day trucking. But trains, as we are going to learn from Don Odiorne, V.P. of Food Service at the Idaho Potato Commission, still very much have a place in agricultural shipping. “Normally the way product came back there years ago, 65% of the time was by rail. That’s the way we got the whole thing started but later on, as there were fewer and fewer central places to drop off potatoes, then trucks became important because you had to get to a specific address, not just to a major distribution area. Now it has flip flopped to trucks being 65 percent of the time and rail about 35% of the time. The sad part about that is that rail is a lot more efficient and leaves less of a carbon footprint. With rail you can actually take a ton of product which is about 2200 pounds a whole mile on 1 gallon of diesel fuel. That’s because you have an engine and several cars behind it, so you take that load and divided by the number of cars so it is extremely efficient. It is just a terrific way to get from one part of the country all the way across to another part of the country in a very economical way.