Moffat Tunnel lease could become part of fight over Uinta Basin Railway

By | July 30, 2023

Opponents of oil-train traffic see opportunity in lease set to expire in January 2025



Diesel locomotives shed exhaust in misty clouds near a tunnel entrance in a snowy mountain scene.

Union Pacific diesels approach the east portal of Colorado’s Moffat Tunnel. UP’s lease on the tunnel, which expires in 2025, is the subject of scrutiny from opponents of more oil-train traffic on the route. Charlie Conway

DENVER — Colorado opponents of the oil-train traffic expected to be generated by the Uinta Basin Railway may attempt to use Union Pacific’s soon-to-expire lease on the Moffat Tunnel as leverage in their effort to fight the Utah project, the website Colorado Newsline reports.

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ENVIRONMENT GOVERNMENT

Oil-train opponents look to railroad’s expiring Moffat Tunnel lease for bargaining power

Uinta Basin rail project in Utah could result in dramatic increase of hazardous material on Union Pacific line through Colorado

BY: DAVID O. WILLIAMS - JULY 28, 2023 4:00 AM



The East Portal of the Moffat Tunnel near Tolland is pictured on June 26, 2023. (Chase Woodruff/Colorado Newsline)

State officials since last spring have quietly been reaching out to communities along Colorado’s main east-west rail line to gauge local sentiment as the state negotiates a new lease with rail giant Union Pacific, which pays $12,000 a year to send trains through the state-owned Moffat Tunnel. ... Union Pacific’s 99-year lease to use the 6.2-mile Moffat Tunnel expires Jan. 6, 2025, and Kate McIntire, a regional manager for the Colorado Department of Local Affairs, has been tasked with “developing our list of concerns, potential opportunities, roles, responsibilities, and ways stakeholders would like to ensure they’re involved in the negotiation.”

McIntire, in conjunction with the Colorado Department of Transportation and the recently formed Public-Private Partnership (P3) Collaboration Unit of the Department of Personnel and Administration, will be ramping up outreach this fall and through 2024. ... McIntire expects to hear more input from counties and towns along Union Pacific’s Central Corridor rail line between Denver and Grand Junction about the controversial 88-mile Uinta Basin Railway proposal in Utah. The project would send up to 350,000 additional barrels of oil per day along the route, which travels for about 100 miles along the headwaters of the endangered Colorado River.

“Yes, some of those comments came up and were addressed more directly to Union Pacific,” McIntire said of meetings the state has already held with Denver Water, which uses the Moffat Tunnel’s original 1922 bore hole for transmountain water diversions; Adams, Gilpin, Grand and Jefferson counties; and the cities of Arvada, Golden, Winter Park, Fraser and Kremmling.

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Trains of tanker cars sit idle on railroad tracks in Grand Junction on May 16, 2023. (Chase Woodruff/Colorado Newsline)

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Tennessee Pass Line

Terry Armistead, a Minturn Town Council member, mayor pro tem, and a member of the Minturn Railroad Committee, made it clear she was not speaking for the whole committee or the entire town council, but she acknowledged she has spoken to McIntire. ... “In regards to the Tennessee Pass Line, I heard nothing in that short meeting of any substance, unfortunately. It was kind of anticlimactic,” Armistead said of a long-dormant Union Pacific rail line that connects to the Central Corridor at Dotsero and heads southeast along the Eagle and Arkansas rivers to Pueblo — a route that if revived would avoid the Moffat Tunnel and Denver altogether. ... That is one of the fears Eagle County expressed in its litigation — added pressure to restart rail traffic on the Tennessee Pass Line through Avon and the former mining and railroad towns of Minturn and Red Cliff off the backside of Vail Mountain.

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For Union Pacific, which did try to formally abandon the TPL in the late 1990s after the merger — only to be snubbed on that front by the U.S. Surface Transportation Board — it’s somewhat of a moot point. ... “We have no plans of reopening the Tennessee Pass,” Union Pacific’s Tysver said.

DAVID O. WILLIAMS
https://twitter.com/davidowilliams

David O. Williams is an award-winning freelance journalist based in EagleVail, Colorado. His work has appeared in more than 75 publications around the world and he owns and operates RealVail.com.

The Valley: In Grand Junction, oil train route would retrace Colorado railroad history

Uinta Basin Railway could send 10 trains per day through remote Ruby Canyon, Palisade orchard country

BY: CHASE WOODRUFF - MONDAY JUNE 26, 2023 4:00 AM

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These tracks have run through Ruby Canyon for well over a century, but traffic has lessened over time. These days, fewer than one train per day on average departs Colorado’s largest remaining coal mine, the West Elk Mine in Gunnison County, bound for points west. They’re joined by irregular assorted freight traffic, also averaging roughly one train per day, and Amtrak’s California Zephyr passenger line, which offers service once daily in either direction on its route between San Francisco and Chicago. ... Soon, however, freight traffic on this railroad could be more than quadrupled, federal regulators estimate, by the construction of a new railway extension in a remote area of eastern Utah, about 100 miles northwest of this spot along the border. Nearly all of the increase would be made up of what alarmed environmentalists have taken to calling “bomb trains” full of combustible fossil fuels.

The 88-mile Uinta Basin Railway would connect Utah’s largest oil field to the national rail network, allowing drillers there to dramatically ramp up production and transport up to 300,000 barrels of oil per day to refineries in Texas and Louisiana. Five hundred tankers full of heated waxy crude oil could depart the Uinta Basin daily, and while they could take several possible paths to the Gulf Coast, all eastbound routes run directly through Ruby Canyon, central Colorado and the Denver metro area.

The railway project, years in the planning and backed by a public-private partnership between Utah county governments and industry, needs billions of dollars in financing before it can become a reality. But it has already secured key permits from President Joe Biden’s administration and has signaled it will soon apply for special tax-exempt infrastructure bonds that must be approved by the Department of Transportation.



A coal train crosses the Colorado-Utah border on May 15, 2023. (Chase Woodruff/Colorado Newsline)

The Uinta Basin Railway would be the largest new railroad project built from scratch in the United States since the 1970s. If it’s built, it will be built not to move people — as many passenger-rail advocates renewed their hopes for in the wake of an Amtrak-loving Democrat’s election to the White House in 2020 — but to feed the beast of the global fossil fuel economy, the dominant contributor to human-caused climate change. ... Greenlighting the railroad would be the latest — and perhaps the largest — in series of energy-development moves by Biden’s administration that run counter to its stated climate goals.

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The Colorado River flows through Grand Junction, June 9, 2023. The railroad is visible coming into the city from the left along the river then turning abruptly east. (William Woody for Colorado Newsline)

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CHASE WOODRUFF
chase@coloradonewsline.com
https://twitter.com/dcwoodruff

Reporter Chase Woodruff covers the environment, the economy and other stories for Colorado Newsline.