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Various friends have been trying to arrange an excursion trip this summer from Minturn to Pueblo, since this will probably be our last chance to ride a train on that route. We've run into a few snags, such as domestic opposition to out-of-practice middle-aged guys indulging in the dangerous pastime of hopping freights.
A steam-powered farewell excursion
is scheduled
in June, but it sold out quickly, even at $400 a head. We
can't afford that, and besides, an open boxcar is more
appealing than a $30,000 motorcycle, the trendy way to be
more than just another bald guy with a mortgage.
We've got to figure out something soon, since the Union Pacific plans to halt service by October. The tracks will stay for another year, and then they get ripped out.
What happens to the corridor then?
Well, when Gov. Roy Romer was betraying the public
during the rail merger deals last year, so that he could
oblige various billionaires (perhaps that's what qualified
him to be chairman of the Democratic National Committee),
he essentially said the abandoned grade would be
rail-banked.
The concept is fairly simple. Although the tracks come up, the corridor stays, just in case the route is needed for rail service on a future occasion when America quits fighting Gulf wars to insure continued production of beltways, bedroom towns, shopping malls and suburban sprawl.
In the interim, the corridor is operated as a foot, horse and bicycle trail.
If I ran things, the tracks would stay in place and trains would run. But UP has set impossible sale conditions for anybody to buy this line and run it profitably.
That means a trail of some sort -- 77 percent of this rail corridor crosses public land. The question is whether the trail will be managed, or turn into a dirt-bike keg-party playground.
There is a bill in the legislature to allow the Colorado Department of Transportation to accept abandoned railroad rights of way and operate them as trails.
It's SB 37, introduced by Sen. Richard F. Mutzebaugh.
Among its provisions: If a donated abandoned railroad
right-of-way traverses private property that is zoned for
any agricultural purposes, the executive director (of the
Colorado Department of Transportation) shall not allow the
use of the right-of-way for recreational trail purposes
without the consent of the property owners adjacent to the
right-of-way.
In other words, anybody running a tax-break hobby ranch gets a veto. Apparently they're worried about the kind of people who might walk or cycle along a trail -- guess they're a worse class than the folks who ride freights and might hop off by their property.
If this veto power would keep the corridor from turning into a trail, I'd probably be for it. We already get a sufficient amount of tourism here, from motorheads to Lycra lemmings, so why add a 170-mile trail to the attractions?
But land-owner veto or not, there will be a trail if the rails come up. The question is what kind of trail, and I'd prefer management with some facilities, rather than a free-for-all with thousands of people crapping along the Arkansas River.
Mutzebaugh's support of property owners' rights is also very selective -- only agricultural land. Do ranchers have more rights than industrial or residential property owners?
He might get more support if he'd extend this power, so that we town folks had the right to veto annexations if they would increase the traffic passing our homes.
Or, where was my veto when the local school district leased the closed parochial school across the street, thus increasing the number of loud kids walking by and disturbing my peace every morning? And even worse, their parents taking up the neighborhood parking and clogging the streets?
Colorado should settle these rail-trail issues soon, because a bigger one is looming. As Mark W. Hemphill pointed out in the March edition of Trains magazine, the UP will use the Moffat Route between Denver and Salt Lake City almost exclusively for coal from the Yampa Valley, the North Fork, and central Utah.
UP makes a lot more money hauling low-sulfur coal out of the Powder River Basin in Wyoming, so UP will shift its resources there. Mines in Colorado and Utah will suffer poor service and lose customers (that could explain why Arco, which owns some of those mines, just announced it was spinning off its coal operations).
Traffic will drop and the UP (following its long-standing corporate geography that Colorado is a place to avoid, not serve) will be able to abandon the 784 miles from Denver to the Moffat Tunnel and westward.
That's a lot of trail, and Colorado should know what to do with it, since it's safe to bet that nobody in state government will lift a finger to keep the trains running. Or at least, they never have before.
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