They met with shippers Thursday.

They met with South Coast lawmakers Thursday afternoon.

They met with Gov. Kulongoski’s staff Friday.

They came up with a timeline, too.

But the document railroad officials gave to legislators is not a timeline for repairing three deteriorating tunnels on the closed Coos Bay short line. Instead, Central Oregon & Pacific Railroad and its parent company RailAmerica provided “A Draft Timeline for Coos Bay Line Public/Private Development.” (see sidebar)

“We can’t force them to run freight. We can’t force them to run trains,” said Chris Warner, Gov. Kulongoski’s transportation adviser.

 And CORP can’t force the state to pay for repairs to the century old, privately owned rail line. The company has said that’s what a public/private partnership would do.

“If there is going to be any kind of public investment, there has to be accountability,” Warner said.

CORP filed an embargo on the line Sept. 21, announcing it would end rail shipments on the line that links Coos and Western Douglas county to Eugene and destinations south, east and north. At the time, a company press release said it would cost $7 million over the next five years for tunnel repairs. It would cost $2.8 million to open the line now.

The state’s in no rush to forge any deals. The money it’s planning to spend is $2 million set aside by the 2007 Oregon Legislature to look at all rail facilities. The study would figure out capacity on lines statewide now and future, and point out how the state could make the wisest use of its dollars — should it choose to invest in rail.

There’s a saying in Salem these days, Warner said, “If you have seven tunnels on a system and you fix six of them, it doesn’t do you a lot of good.”

The one-day warning of the Coos Bay line closure Sept. 21 whipped up a flurry of cross-state and cross-country phone calls, e-mails and face-to-face meetings.

The state demanded to see an engineering report justifying the closure. State officials got their hands on that Wednesday, but said it will not be released to the public since it is privileged business information.

“I will tell you it was a report that was written in July,” said Oregon Rail Division Administrator Kelly Taylor. “... It outlines concerns with different parts of the tunnels.”

Congressman Peter DeFazio demanded an investigation into the railroad’s statements that three of the nine tunnels pose a safety hazard. He wants Federal Railroad Administration inspectors on the tracks and in the tunnels. The team is due here next week, DeFazio’s office said Friday.

“The FRA is going to perform focused inspections that will include reviewing and auditing inspection and maintenance records, and that will include visual inspections,” said Warren Flatau, the agency’s public affairs specialist.

While inspectors might be hustling, there’s no indication trains will budge for eight months or more.

CORP’s general manager, Kevin Spradlin, who’s based in Roseburg, answered his mobile phone Friday afternoon. He had little to say.

“I need to refer you to our public relations’ folks,” Spradlin said three times before hanging up.

The company’s spokeswoman, at Boca Raton, Florida-based Tilson Communications, has returned no phone calls or e-mails since the closure.

At meetings Thursday and Friday, railroad officials indicated the soonest repairs might happen is May. In the meantime, Union Pacific railroad officials reportedly are meeting with sawmill owners and Reedsport-based American Bridge to come up with other options to help get their products and raw materials from factory to rail.

All the while, American Bridge is left scrambling trying to figure out how complete steel structure jobs for projects in Washington and California and still make money on contracts signed long ago. What would cost 5 cents per pound to ship by rail costs 25 cents per pound to ship by truck, said Donna Train, manager of the Port of Umpqua.

Train has been working through the Douglas County Industrial Development Board to help Reedsport-area businesses expand. American Bridge was hoping to boost its work force from 57 to 80 by the end of the year. A second company, Dailey Wood Products, was planning to open a wood pellet production mill at Bolon Island. Train isn’t sure how the loss of rail will affect those businesses’ plans.

Then there’s Oregon Resources, the company moving through the permitting process to open a chromite mine and processing facility in Coos County. Chief Operating Officer Dan Smith told Coos Bay port officials at a meeting last week his company plans to ship out 700 to 1,000 rail cars a year on the Coos Bay line.

That would bolster CORP’s statewide rail car shipments that totaled 45,017 in 2006, according to the Oregon Rail Division. That was down from a 10-year high of 49,446 rail cars in 2005, but a big jump from the 32,000 carloads that moved across the tracks in 1995. Taylor estimated the Coos Bay line accounts for 10 to 15 percent of that traffic.

Statistics aside, railroad officials have told lawmakers they aren’t making money off the Coos Bay line, especially if millions of dollars in needed repairs are penciled in.

The meeting between Southern Oregon legislators and railroad officials Thursday afternoon was cordial, but there’s no hint of a solution. Sen. Joanne Verger, D-Coos Bay, said she felt the railroad managers left with a clear understanding of the issues they face with the shippers, with the public and with the Legislature.

But, she said, lawmakers, too, walked away with a clear understanding of railroad managers’ sentiment.

“They don’t look at it like it’s their problem,” Verger said.