Unfortunately, origin to destination shipment travel time data for rail shipments is not something that railroads are required to report (Transportation Research Board, 2015); therefore validating the model results was difficult for conventional and shuttle rail service. We were unable to obtain reliable data for conventional service rail travel times between the Upper Midwest and the Pacific Northwest. We validated the shuttle service rail time model results via conversations with representatives of large grain companies in the Upper Midwest including Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) and Cenex Harvest States (CHS). Representatives from both companies stated that under normal operating conditions, the average shuttle train makes three round trips between the Upper Midwest and the Pacific Northwest in a month (i.e. approximately 5 days per one-way trip). The results in Fig. 3 suggest that the one-way rail transportation time is approximately 3.0 days; however, this does not include the 13 h required to load the shuttle train at the terminal elevator and the time spent unloading the grain from the shuttle train at the export terminal. Adding these two values to the 3.0 days obtained in the shuttle train rail time model returns a value between 4 and 5 days. This result suggests that the shuttle train time model results are reasonable.