PHOTO: The Colorado River flows through Palisade on June 9, 2023. The railroad is seen at left running through town and meeting up with the river near the top of the frame. William Woody for Colorado Newsline.
This article series by Chase Woodruff appeared on Colorado Newsline on June 26, 2023.. We are sharing it in multiple parts.
Five miles due south of the point where Interstate 70 crosses the Colorado-Utah border, a maze of slickrock washes and desert bunchgrass descends into a broad canyon carved out of the sandstone by the Colorado River.
Here, on the high northern banks of a river that supplies water to 40 million people across the Southwest, there is no photogenic sign bidding visitors “Welcome to Colorful Colorado.” Campers and mountain bikers can crisscross the border without ever realizing it. Most of the interstate traffic consists of a steady flow of rafters and kayakers floating into Utah through Ruby Canyon, a 25-mile segment of the Colorado River treasured by local guides for its family-friendly flatwater conditions and the billion-year-old rock layers it shares with some of the most scenic stretches of the Grand Canyon, 400 miles downriver.
On a clear, hot morning in mid-May, the only sounds that could be heard in this remote place were the faint rush of a river surging with spring snowmelt, a chorus of birds singing in the sagebrush and juniper trees, and the occasional shout of rafters on the river below.
Then a low rumbling began.
For a minute or so, the noise grew louder and louder, amplified almost to a roar by the canyon walls overhead. Many of the daytrippers paddling leisurely at the waterline probably hadn’t yet noticed the train tracks winding along the elevated riverbank — but now the powerful diesel engines of the Union Pacific locomotive brought it charging around a bend, hauling a mile-long train of fully loaded coal cars behind it.
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.
Down the Line: The Valley
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.
As an 88-mile new right-of-way purpose-built to haul Uinta Basin crude, the project would rank among the most ambitious sustained efforts to transport oil by rail ever undertaken in the U.S. It could singlehandedly more than double the average of around 268,000 barrels per day that were shipped by rail across the entire country last year and increase crude oil shipments originating in a five-state Rocky Mountain region by nearly 1,500%, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
The increased production in the Uinta Basin would result in as much as 53 million additional tons of greenhouse gas emissions annually — the equivalent of opening more than 14 new coal-fired power plants, and double the projected climate impact of the highly controversial Willow Project in Alaska.
“At some point, one would hope that the Biden administration would live up to its soaring rhetoric about what to do about climate change,” said Ted Zukoski, a senior attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity. “Because this really just makes a mockery of those commitments.”
The partnership behind the railway says it “brings hope and promise to rural, eastern Utah, its counties and the citizens in neighboring states,” arguing that rail shipment of hazardous materials is “nothing new” and pointing to data showing that trains are a safer mode of transport than trucks. Backers have also downplayed climate concerns, suggesting that compared to other types of crude oil, more of the Uinta Basin’s waxy crude would be used for lubricants and other industrial applications, rather than as fuel.
But the project has drawn opposition from across the political spectrum in Colorado, including from Republican state lawmakers and county commissioners. Democratic U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, a moderate who has supported drilling on public lands and export infrastructure for Colorado’s natural gas industry, said earlier this year that the project’s approval “would be a black mark on the president’s environmental record.”
With the exception of a small portion that could be routed to the Pacific Northwest or the Midwest, federal regulators predict that nearly all of the increased production would be bound for refineries along the Gulf Coast, including a region in Louisiana known as Cancer Alley, where residents are exposed to drastically elevated health risks from the air pollution emitted by more than 200 refineries and petrochemical plants along the Mississippi River. Once the oil is refined into gasoline, diesel or other fuels, it could be shipped all over the world, and after being combusted its carbon molecules will drift high into the atmosphere, helping to trap the sun’s heat and cause global temperatures to rise.
But long before all that, the Uinta Basin’s oil will have to make the 300-mile journey through some of the most densely populated and environmentally fragile places in Colorado.
Mile 0: Ruby Canyon
Within just a few short years, the Uinta Basin Railway’s construction could result in as many as five fully loaded, two-mile-long oil trains crossing into Colorado through the remote Ruby Canyon every day. Here, on the first leg of their journey through the Centennial State, hugging the north bank of the Colorado River, they will be surrounded on all sides by more than 200,000 acres of protected public lands, including the Black Ridge Canyons Wilderness just across the river, where not even mountain bikes are allowed.
But Ruby Canyon, cherished though it is, hardly tops the list of places that Coloradans living along the oil trains’ path are most concerned about.
From there, the trains will travel the length of the Grand Valley, one of the state’s leading agricultural centers, along an exposed road in the heart of Palisade orchard country, where a rail car recently caught fire. They will wind through the narrow Glenwood Canyon, scarred in recent years by devastating wildfires and mudslides, where conditions bedeviled structural engineers for so long that a 12-mile section of I-70 built into its cliffs became in 1992 the last and most expensive segment of the federal highway system to be completed.
On their eastbound route to Denver over the Rocky Mountains, the oil trains will pass through 16 different Colorado municipalities, 25 water districts and four national forests. They will gain and drop thousands of feet in elevation and spend mile after mile of their journey in areas not accessible by any road. They will travel along hundred-foot cliff edges, around one of the tightest mainline railroad curves in the country, beside two of its most endangered rivers, through a six-mile tunnel under the Continental Divide, and down a watershed that collects into a vital reservoir for the 1.5 million customers of the Denver Water system.
“It threatens water supplies and the environment, should it spill,” said Kirk Klancke, president of the Colorado River Headwaters chapter of Trout Unlimited, an anglers’ conservation group. “We have more of an attitude of when it spills, not if it spills.”
That attitude is backed up by data from federal regulators, who estimated in a “downline analysis” that Uinta Basin oil trains could, on average, cause a rail accident between Kyune, Utah, and Denver once every 13 months. Accidents severe enough to cause a spill of up to 30,000 gallons of crude oil, regulators predict, will occur roughly once every five years.
The Seven County Infrastructure Coalition, a public body made up of Utah county governments, first sought approval for the railway’s construction in 2019. The Uinta Basin Railway is a “preliminary public-private partnership” between the SCIC, Drexel Hamilton Infrastructure Partners and the Rio Grande Pacific Corporation, a small private rail operator based in Texas. The partnership has said it’s “committed to minimizing and mitigating environmental impacts where possible,” and will comply with “all federal, state, and local environmental regulations.”
The Surface Transportation Board voted 4-1 in December 2021 to approve the project, after the agency’s Office of Environmental Analysis wrote that it “does not expect that downline impacts would be significant.”
But Colorado’s Eagle County has joined environmental groups in suing to overturn the STB’s decision, which it says was based on a faulty and incomplete environmental review. In a legal brief supporting the suit, attorneys representing a group of 10 Colorado city and county governments called the federal government’s analysis “fatally flawed” and argued that its predicted accident rates — alarming as they already are to many communities along the route — understate the true risk level.
“The release of highly flammable crude oil could ruin this unique region for decades,” the governments wrote. “The Board neither analyzed the profound economic harm these accidents will induce, nor considered (or adopted) any mitigation measures to lessen these calamitous impacts in the I-70 corridor.”
Separately from Eagle County’s lawsuit, Colorado communities dependent on outdoor-recreation industries have lobbied for contingency measures, including emergency response equipment that would be stored locally and an escrow account to cover potential cleanup costs, but so far they’ve received no such assurances.
“You need to have some (resources) in Eagle County, some in Grand County, some in Mesa County, and just do what you can to have a rapid response readily available, because the sooner you can get to spills the better,” Rich Cimino, a Grand County commissioner, said in an interview. “But the reality is, you’re just not going to get there fast enough, and then it’s going to be years of cleanup, and who knows what damage could be done to recreation.”
“If I could go back in history,” Cimino added, “I’d be happy if the train never came through here at all.”
Conquering the mountains
More than just passing through some of Colorado’s most treasured landscapes, the twists and turns on the 300-mile route from Ruby Canyon to Denver retrace more than a century and a half of the Centennial State’s rich railroading history — a history that begins with bitter disappointment.
Denver’s early pioneers had taken it for granted that the nation’s first transcontinental railroad would run directly through the city and the gold fields that surrounded it. “Already this middle point on the route is fixed, almost as indissolubly as is the Eastern or Western terminus,” declared William Byers’ Rocky Mountain News just a few months after Denver’s founding in 1859. But the engineers of the Union Pacific Railroad Company concluded by 1866 that a route over the Rockies west of Denver would be cost-prohibitive.
Instead, when the famous golden spike was driven home at Promontory Point three years later, it completed a route that passed 100 miles to Denver’s north through Cheyenne, Wyoming, and didn’t enter Colorado at all except for a brief zigzag into tiny Julesburg, in the far northwest corner of the soon-to-be state.
It would be more than 70 years before Byers’ vision of a direct line between Denver and Salt Lake City through the Rockies was fully realized and trains first traveled the route that Uinta Basin oil tankers could take in the near future through central Colorado. Much of that track would be laid down not by the Union Pacific or its top rivals but by a scrappy independent operator called the Denver & Rio Grande Railway Company, which over more than a century in business earned a variety of affectionate nicknames, from the “Baby Road” to the “Action Road” to the “Rebel of the Rockies,” or simply the Rio Grande.
Founded in 1870, the Denver & Rio Grande initially expanded south to Pueblo and New Mexico and then into the booming silver-mining region of the San Juan Mountains. Rather than the standard gauge of 4 feet, 8 1/2 inches between rails, the Denver & Rio Grande initially built out its system using a 3-foot narrow gauge.
“Right about the time we’re getting to where we can settle on a standard gauge for railroading, the narrow-gauge movement comes along and confuses things,” said Paul Hammond, director of the Colorado Railroad Museum in Golden. “The Denver & Rio Grande saw this as a way to conquer the mountains, using a new technology that at the time it was believed would be much cheaper to build, and cheaper to maintain.”
A narrow-gauge locomotive of the Denver & Rio Grande Western Railway pictured in 1889. (Denver Public Library Special Collections, Z-202)
When the 1881 expulsion of the Ute people from their lands in western Colorado abruptly opened up the possibility of a new route to Salt Lake City, the Denver & Rio Grande jumped at the chance — and found a willing partner in the town of Grand Junction, settled at the confluence of the Colorado and Gunnison rivers, within weeks of the Utes’ forced removal.
From the beginning, the Denver & Rio Grande and Grand Junction understood their value to one another. The railroad’s officers bought half of the stock in the Grand Junction Town Company, and with it, half of its land and half of the seats in city government. “The Denver & Rio Grande Railway Company own a half interest in the town site of this place,” crowed the Grand Junction News to prospective residents in 1882. “It is a question of business with them to make this an important town.”
Grand Junction found itself enjoying the kind of “favor and influence” that the Union Pacific had withheld from Denver 15 years earlier. Overnight, the new settlement became a rowdy boomtown as workers arrived to lay track west into Utah. A roundhouse, repair pits, machine shops and smithies to service locomotives and rail cars became some of the town’s first major buildings. With the Utes expelled and forced onto small reservations to the south and west, the Grand Valley became the last of Colorado’s present-day population centers to be settled by white people, who rushed in to claim vast tracts of its fertile, low-lying farmland.
By the end of the decade, the U.S. Census Bureau would declare the American frontier closed. The days of the Wild West were over, and now its fast-growing towns, with the help of the railroads, dreamed of the industrial and agricultural empires they could build in its place. When the Rio Grande’s line to Salt Lake was completed in 1883, the Denver Tribune predicted that the Grand Valley, “capable of astonishing production” of “every variety of fruit and cereal,” was poised to become the breadbasket of the American West.
“The advantages of the country have caused several railroad corporations to look on it with covetous eyes,” wrote the Tribune. “But the Denver & Rio Grande, with its customary enterprise, has made it its own.”
Rules of the road
The track that runs through Ruby Canyon rejoins I-70 near the tiny, unincorporated towns of Mack and Loma, at the westernmost edge of the crescent-shaped Grand Valley. Out here on the edge of the desert, agriculture consists mostly of alfalfa fields and small sheep and cattle operations.
Just ahead of the I-70 Loma exit, tractor trailers hauling freight into Colorado from Utah hit their brakes and turn onto an off-ramp. “All vehicles with livestock must exit,” says one sign. “Weigh and Check Station – Next Right,” says another.
Even trucks that don’t stop here, at one of Colorado’s 10 official ports of entry, pass under an electronic sensor that records their information and checks it against a database to ensure that they have one of several required state-issued permits. Trucking companies that haul large amounts of freight along the I-70 corridor are required to register with the Colorado Department of Transportation, and trucks hauling hazardous materials like crude oil are subject to further scrutiny.
“My permitting system talks to the port of entry’s business system,” said Craig Hurst, manager of the Colorado Department of Transportation’s Freight Mobility and Safety Branch. “So when that truck is coming in, say they’re coming into that Loma port … there’s a couple different technology pieces that do electronic screening.”
In addition to aiding enforcement by the Colorado State Patrol’s motor-carrier and hazmat divisions, the data that the state collects at ports of entry allows Hurst’s branch to make informed decisions about a wide range of traffic safety measures, from approved hazmat routes, weight restrictions, vertical clearances and where to spend infrastructure dollars.
That stands in stark contrast to freight shipped by rail. Federal laws preempt states’ authority to regulate most aspects of rail transport, and Hurst said that while the state sometimes gets glimpses at “after-the-fact” data voluntarily provided by railroad companies, it’s mostly in the dark about what goods are crossing into Colorado on the tracks just a mile to the north of the Loma weigh station.
“I wouldn’t say trucking data is amazing, but it’s far better than freight rail data, because we can dive down a little deeper on commodities and things like that,” Hurst said. “From a regulatory standpoint, anything that’s being moved on rail, because it’s interstate, that’s all done by the (Federal Railroad Administration).”