The Terminal

New to truck drivers this year, is the ability to haul to Ritzville Warehouse Templin Terminal.  This is a huge grain transfer station, just outside of the town of Ritzville.  Previous years, Ritzville Warehouse has contracted with commercial truckers to transfer grain from all their satellite stations to the terminal, where it is loaded on to trains and shipped out.

This year, management decided to allow farmers with semi trucks to haul to the terminal, vastly reducing the amount of grain that Ritzville Warehouse has to transfer themselves.  This only works for farmers that are in a relatively close proximity to the Terminal.

We were able to haul our spring wheat crop to the Terminal, but not our winter wheat crop.  Good news for us, our winter wheat was yielding too much grain for us to get back to the field in time, without making the combines wait.  Our little Tokio warehouse is closer to our fields.  The spring wheat yields are not as good, so we are able to get to the Terminal and back, though we still have little down time from our furthest field.

Here are a few photos of what the Terminal looks like!

Every  truck has one of these card readers that an electronic eye ball reads as you drive on to the scale.

Then there is this touch screen where you enter your information each time you bring in a load of grain.  My family was pretty sure I was going to fry this thing the first time I got near it, given my track record with electronics!  But, so far, I have not!!

This is one of the screens that comes up.  After this is, you enter the commodity that you are hauling (soft white wheat) and then the next screen is your farm number, then if spits out this ticket for you to give to the guy at the dump pit.

This is the ticket that it spits out.

Then there is a screen that tells you which pile to go to.  This means ground pile number 6.

Here I am, emptying in to  pit at ground pile number 6.

This belt take the grain to the top of the pile.  

This pile is full.  There's about 1 million bushels of grain per pile.

Then, when you are done, you go back and weigh out and this machine spits out our ticket for that load.  You get a ticket after each load.  I was in a state of high anxiety the first day we hauled here, but now I'm more used to it.  I still like my little Tokio warehouse best though!

Now I'm finished unloading my truck and ready to go back for another.  

Saturday there was a train that was waiting to unload.  There are 100 grain cars in a unit train.  This one is most likely bringing red wheat from Montana to store here until the price goes up a little more.  

This photo shows a pile that has been prepared to take the grain that the train has hauled in.  You can also see the difference in color between the piles in the back ground.  The closer pile is red wheat and the two piles in the distance are soft white wheat that have all been hauled in from our area.