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Since it's fashionable to blame your parents for your problems these days, I'll blame my dad for this one -- I'm a railroad buff. I have many fond memories of Sunday afternoon rides about this time of year during the late 1950s and early 60s, when the sugar-beet harvest campaign in northern Colorado was going at full speed.
This abundance of traffic forced the railroads along the Front Range to drag out their almost-scrapped steam locomotives, and we thrilled to roll along some county road next to the Great Western's majestic No. 90, or less memorable machines from the Union Pacific, Colorado & Southern, and Chicago, Burlington & Quincy.
Over the years, I've managed to hustle an occasional
caboose or cab ride, and in early 1973, even got to drive a
steam locomotive. It was just a saddle-tanked dinky
switching in the Loveland yards of the Great Western Sugar
Co., but I felt close to divine, throttle lever and Johnson
bar and whistle cord all at hand, heeding instructions from
Joe Martinez, the regular engineer of the Gray
Mule.
Okay, we journalistic types are supposed to be as objective as surveillance cameras and as tough and unsentimental as granite.
But when I got the news in 1995 that the Union Pacific planned to swallow the Southern Pacific, which included the Denver & Rio Grande Western, and that they planned to abandon the Tennessee Pass line that passes through Salida, my reaction was strictly emotional.
How the hell could they? Salida was built by the railroad in 1880, essentially as a company town. Don't these corporations have some obligation toward their offspring?
The reasons advanced for abandonment sounded specious or worse. Tennessee Pass is a steep and slow route. But if the Rio Grande could have abandoned it, it would have long ago -- the route turned out to be necessary to get heavy stuff across Colorado. Ditto for the Southern Pacific, which invested millions in improving the line for the same reasons that the D&RGW couldn't abandon it.
Despite its geographic flaws, Tennessee Pass had competed effectively against the Union Pacific's relatively straight and level Wyoming mainline for more than a century.
Anyone who bothered with Colorado history could see that it had always been considered vital for Colorado to have its own east-west line not under UP control. The UP's corporate geography has since 1867 seen Colorado as a place to go around, not serve. Generations of Colorado governors and Denver capitalists had struggled mightily to make sure Colorado was served.
Until this generation and this merger, that is. Billionaire Phil Anschutz was unable to make the SP pay, and the UP's ego was hurt after the Burlington Northern merged with the Santa Fe in 1994 and the UP was no longer the nation's biggest railroad.
And Anschutz, who had paid $1.8 billion for the SP, then sold off $1.6 billion in assets, could pick up $4.5 billion in UP stock with the merger. The lobbyists were dispatched to Washington, and somebody whispered sweet things into Gov. Roy Romer's ear, and we heard all manner of lies.
Romer said Colorado would get better rail service. Even
though there were competent operators, like Montana Rail
Link, interested in Colorado, he refused to deal with them.
UP put out press releases which predicted extensive new
single-line service, faster schedules, more frequent and
reliable service, shorter routes and improved equipment
utilization.
Now ponder the results. Gasoline is selling at record prices in Grand Junction because the UP takes days, instead of hours, to haul tank cars from the refinery in Denver to the tank farm in the Western Slope. A beer distributor there had to switch to trucks -- more expense for him and more congestion for I-70 the rest of us-- because UP couldn't deliver in a timely way.
That's just in Colorado, and our problems are minor compared to the national complications from Anschutz's greed and UP's ineptitude. Lumber is backed up in Oregon, chemicals are snarled in Texas, causing $100 million in losses, and Christmas goods from the Orient are stuck in Los Angeles.
So far, the UP mess has cost the national economy hundreds of millions of dollars -- and UP said it was going to save $750 million a year thanks to its efficiency.
This snarl started in late August, just after UP ran the last through train over Tennessee Pass, which had been handling 20 trains a day.
But I'm just a sentimental small-town railroad buff, not nearly as smart as our governor. So I keep waiting for him to issue a statement which confirms his earlier announcements about how we'll all be better off after the merger. I know Phil Anschutz is better off, and that should be enough for Roy Romer. It always has been before.
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