There’s no escaping the rumble of freight trains in Nick Linden’s office.
He’s one of the owners of Vic B. Linden Sign Advertising Inc. at 122 S. Lincoln St., which shares a wall with the elevated train tracks that carry crude oil through downtown Spokane.
For more than six decades, the commercial sign company and the rail tracks have been neighbors.
“They’re right overhead,” Linden said. “We see a lot of things going by, from airplane fuselages to automotive parts.”
Now, two to three oil trains are part of the daily freight traffic. In the event of a derailment, tank cars carrying flammable Bakken crude could come crashing down on the low brick building that has housed the sign company since 1952. The possibility of a fiery train wreck has occurred to Linden, though it’s not something he dwells on during the day-to-day demands of running a business.
“It’s not that we have our heads in the sand. There are obvious issues with oil trains,” he said. But most of the time, “we’re busy helping our customers.”