Two companies hope to revive passenger, freight rail service on Tennessee Pass Line

By David O. Williams
November 30, 2020, 8:11 am

A pair of railroad companies are competing to reactivate Union Pacific’s inactive Tennessee Pass Line from Dotsero to Pueblo, using both passenger and freight service to garner community support along the approximately 208-mile stretch of track that bisects Eagle County. ... In a RealVail.com exclusive that first ran in the Denver Gazette on Nov. 19, an attorney for Colorado Pacific Railroad and the company’s owner, Stefan Soloviev, outlined a plan to pump an estimated $278 million into revamping the rail line that hasn’t seen freight trains since 1997 and hasn’t had passenger service since 1964.

Soloviev, the son of recently deceased billionaire New York City developer Sheldon Solow, has built an agricultural empire in southwestern Kansas and southeastern Colorado, where he took over control of a 122-mile rail line connecting his grain and hemp fields to Front Range rail lines east of Pueblo. Now he wants to take a mountain shortcut to Dotsero, where an active Union Pacific rail line runs west through Glenwood Canyon and then on to the West Coast.

To garner the support of counties along the inactive line, Soloviev said he will offer year-round daily passenger service between Pueblo and Minturn, throwing in 60 miles of recreational trail along the train tracks from Leadville to Salida. Eagle County Commissioner Kathy Chandler-Henry told Real Vail she’s obviously more interested in commuter rail and trails between Dotsero and Minturn, especially if the line is going to see renewed freight service anyway. ... Soloviev earlier this year tried unsuccessfully to get the feds to compel Union Pacific to sell him the line for $8.8 million after the rail company declined his original $10 million offer, and he’ll go that route again if UP continues to balk – this time showing the requisite “public convenience and necessity” needed to get the attention of the U.S. Surface Transportation Board.

UP officials for the first time confirmed to RealVail.com they are currently in negotiations with Texas-based Rio Grande Pacific – a relatively small, short-line operator of commuters lines that got its start buying its first line from UP in 1986. The same company had been previously mentioned in a deal to work with a Utah rail line interested in moving crude oil east along the Tennessee Pass Line to Oklahoma and Gulf Coast refineries in Texas. ... UP told RealVail.com it will continue working with Rio Grande Pacific on a lease deal and will only talk to Soloviev’s Colorado Pacific Railroad if those negotiations fall through. The Nov. 19 Denver Gazette article prompted a response from Rio Grande Pacific included in a version of the story that ran in the Colorado Springs Gazette on Nov. 29 and OutThereColorado.com.

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Colorado Pacific pledges passenger trains, trails to revive rail traffic on Tennessee Pass Line

DAVID O. WILLIAMS Special to The Gazette Nov 28, 2020 Updated Dec 18, 2020