The Oil Train from Utah, Part Two

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

This article series by Chase Woodruff appeared on Colorado Newsline on June 26, 2023.. We are sharing it in multiple parts.

Read Part One

Over the centuries, the scope of federal railroad regulation has ebbed and flowed in response to economic and political pressures. In the rail barons’ Gilded Age heyday, regulations were few and monopolistic practices were rampant. Much of Colorado’s enthusiasm for the Denver & Rio Grande’s route through Grand Junction to Salt Lake City stemmed from the hope that it would restore a measure of competition and bring down extortionate transcontinental shipping rates.

“Railroads charged what they charged, and weren’t always the best corporate citizens,” said Hammond.

Amid mounting public outrage, especially in the West, a series of trust-busting federal laws passed beginning in 1887 created the Interstate Commerce Commission — “the first regulatory commission in U.S. history,” according to the National Archives — granting it broad powers to rein in the railroads’ monopoly powers and eventually to regulate the trucking and utility industries, too. The ICC established the nation’s common-carrier system and enacted regulations to ensure “just and reasonable” shipping rates, helping small- and mid-sized railroads like the Denver & Rio Grande survive all across the country.

Using aggressive marketing campaigns with slogans like “Through the Rockies, Not Around Them,” the Denver & Rio Grande thrived in the 20th century, pioneering the long-haul California Zephyr passenger line, the Ski Train to Winter Park and a “fast freight” philosophy that used shorter trains and multiple locomotives to move swiftly across Colorado’s alpine terrain.

“They knew that they had mountains to conquer, and what they had to do was offer fast, efficient service to compete with the Union Pacific,” Hammond said. “Getting tonnage up and over those mountains is no small thing.”

Carl Smith is a third-generation railroader and the Colorado legislative director for the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers, or SMART, which represents about 650 rail workers across the state. After growing up in Pueblo, Smith followed in his father’s and grandfather’s footsteps and went to work on the Denver & Rio Grande system in the 1980s, around the time that the company acquired the Southern Pacific Railroad and assumed the better-known railroad’s brand.

Back then, railroad jobs didn’t just pay well — they were plentiful, too.

“It was a good blue-collar job that had a pension, that had health care, that had benefits,” Smith said. “Forty years ago, when there were still cabooses, there was an engineer, and he had an apprentice engineer called a fireman, and there was a conductor, and a rear brakeman in the caboose, and a head brakeman in the locomotive.”

But the railroad business was changing fast. Technological advances meant more automation and fewer workers needed to operate trains. Efforts to deregulate the transportation industry under President Ronald Reagan dramatically weakened the ICC’s authority. And a wave of consolidation put much of the nation’s rail network in the hands of a few small conglomerates, as the number of so-called Class I railroads in the U.S. was reduced from 40 in 1980 to seven today. A new class of private-equity investors — including Colorado oil billionaire Phil Anschutz, who bought the Denver & Rio Grande in the early 1980s — saw in railroads the same financial opportunity that their industrialist predecessors had seen a century earlier.

In 1995, the ICC was abolished. A year later, Anschutz sold the Denver & Rio Grande system to its old foe, the Union Pacific — one of many acquisitions that has made the famed transcontinental pioneer the country’s most powerful corporate railroad giant.

Today, the Denver & Rio Grande’s Denver-to-Salt Lake stretch makes up the eastern half of the Union Pacific’s “Central Corridor” line. If the Uinta Basin Railway is built, it will connect with the Central Corridor near Kyune, and oil trains heading to the Gulf Coast will travel on Union Pacific tracks at least as far as Denver; from there, they could continue on the Union Pacific system or onto lines operated by its top competitor, BNSF.

With almost every mile of railroad track in Colorado controlled by just two corporate behemoths, the power of state-level authorities like CDOT and the Public Utilities Commission to effectively regulate rail operations has been greatly diminished. Still, safety advocates and rail workers’ unions have called on states to reassert their authority where no federal preemptions exist — especially in the wake of a headline-grabbing derailment and chemical spill in East Palestine, Ohio, earlier this year.

In the months following the disaster, Ohio lawmakers passed a rail safety law that included a two-person crew minimum for all freight trains traveling through the state, a measure long championed by rail workers’ unions who fear that further automation will impact jobs and operational safety. Colorado Democrats enacted such a law after taking full control of the General Assembly in 2019, over opposition from Republicans and the railroad lobby.

“The railroads generally are opposed to any type of regulation which requires them to spend money and make less of a profit,” Smith said. “We’re seeing lots of talk after the big accident in Ohio, how they’re sorry. ‘Oh, boo-hoo — but we don’t need any more regulation.’”

Mile 34: Grand Junction
More than 140 years after its founding, Grand Junction today is hardly the railroad town it once was.

Its small Amtrak station shares an outbuilding with a diner and a construction firm on the far southwest edge of downtown, separated from the busy Main Street by an expanse of parking lots and four lanes of high-speed traffic. Next door, the historic Grand Junction Union Depot, built in 1906, lies empty and in disrepair, though a restoration effort is underway.

Though it was once a major crew-change point for trains hauling coal and other freight along the busy Denver & Rio Grande, the decline in coal shipments, especially, has steadily pushed the number of rail workers in Grand Junction even lower.

“It’s actually one of our smallest locals now,” Smith said.

Unlike in many smaller communities along the Central Corridor, the Union Pacific’s tracks here don’t run directly through the busiest parts of town, veering instead into an industrial zone and freight depots to the south — out of sight and out of mind for a city that has mostly sprawled to the north and east, with the exception of regular train horn blasts heard in the distance. Jason Nguyen, a Grand Junction City Council member, said local public awareness about the potential Uinta Basin oil trains is low.

“I haven’t honestly heard much from the community about it,” Nguyen said. “It certainly hasn’t come up in council.”

Determining exactly how much the Uinta Basin Railway would increase rail traffic through the Grand Valley and other “downline” communities in Colorado is made difficult by a lack of solid public data. But summaries shared with local governments suggest that the project would result in a dramatic surge in tanker-car traffic on the Western Slope. Andy Martsolf, director of the Emergency Services Division of the Mesa County Sheriff’s Office, told Newsline in an email that a “commodity flow study” showed that 550 million gallons of hazardous materials were shipped by rail within the county in 2021.

“Commodity flow studies are classified as sensitive security information as well as trade secrets by the rail industry,” he wrote, explaining that no further information could be released.

The 550 million gallon total represents an average of about 50 fully loaded, 30,000-gallon tanker cars passing through Mesa County daily. Crude oil traffic from the Uinta Basin Railway could result in as much as a tenfold increase in that figure, pushing the average to around 500 tanker cars per day.

The SMART union, representing workers eager to see traffic on the rails rebound, supports the Uinta Basin Railway project — with a big caveat.

“We want to move these Uinta oil trains, but we want to do it safely,” Smith said.

SMART members were one of four rail workers’ unions who voted to reject a contract with the railroads last year over a lack of paid sick leave and other concerns, raising the possibility of a strike before Biden and bipartisan majorities in Congress forced the ratification of the deal, which eight other rail unions had approved.

The tense negotiations, which came just weeks before the East Palestine derailment, exposed a widening rift between unions and railroad management over working conditions in the industry. Under pressure from investors, rail conglomerates have increasingly adopted a suite of shipping practices that are lumped together under the buzzword “precision scheduled railroading,” or PSR.

“Precision scheduled railroading is a Wall Street scheme, a hedge fund scheme, to basically make railroads do more with less,” said Smith.

On its website, Union Pacific describes PSR as a model “intended to benefit customers by providing consistent, reliable, predictable service.” In practice, Smith said, it means larger numbers of cars on fewer trains, and fewer crews to work them. Once again, railroads are tight-lipped and solid public data is sparse, but one federal report found that average train length had grown by as much 25%, to roughly a mile and a half, over the decade prior to 2017.

In addition to being harder to slow down, these longer, heavier trains make it more difficult for crews to handle any problems that arise. Smith said that with train lengths often exceeding two miles, the handheld radios that crew members use can’t reliably communicate between the front of the train and the back. Increasingly, trains are too long to use existing “sidings,” the short parallel sections of track that enable two-way traffic on largely single-track routes, leading to a widely reported rise in idle trains blocking traffic at crossings for hours on end in small towns across the country.

With the right regulations in place, rail workers are confident that they can do their part to safely transport Uinta Basin oil without accidents. Trains already haul limited amounts of oil and other hazardous materials to and from destinations in the Grand Valley, including a small Suncor Energy oil terminal there, and crews are vigilant about ensuring that there “will never be an issue in the Colorado River,” Smith said.

“We continually talk about making sure, if you get one of the oil trains out of Grand Junction, you’re sure that the air tests have been done properly, any sign of brake malfunction, car malfunction, any type of incident — right away, stop and inspect,” he added. “We’re preaching that to our members on a regular basis, because that’s how important those jobs are to us, until we transition to whatever the new economy looks like for railroad workers.”

In an email, Union Pacific spokesperson Robynn Tysver wrote: “Union Pacific shares the same goals as our customers and the communities we serve — to deliver every tank car safely. We are required by federal law to transport hazardous commodities that Americans use daily, including crude oil, fertilizer and chlorine, and 99.9% of the hazardous material shipped by rail reaches its destination safely.”

Mile 45: Palisade
Especially in the absence of tighter regulations, however, many communities along the Union Pacific line say the risk posed by the oil trains is too great.

After rolling through the rail yards of Grand Junction, trains pick up speed as they head east out of town onto an arrow-straight stretch of track that cuts through the heart of Palisade orchard country. Here, the growing season is lengthened by a “million dollar wind” that funnels warm air into the valley through De Beque Canyon and the Book Cliffs to the northeast, giving arid Colorado its unlikely status as the country’s seventh-largest peach-producing state.

In addition to the 30 million pounds of peaches its growers produce annually, Palisade has made itself into the state’s top agritourism destination. Bed and breakfasts, boutique hotels and luxury vineyard retreats have proliferated. Visitors can travel the town’s Fruit and Wine Byway by vintage bicycle or horse-drawn carriage.

It can be easy to forget that a railroad that carries dangerous freight bisects this idyllic place along the two-lane U.S. Highway 6. But some residents got a literal wake-up call in early May, when a rail car caught fire in the middle of the night near the Field to Fork Organic Farm a mile west of town. It took crews from five area fire departments two hours to put out the blaze, which started shortly before midnight on May 2 in a car carrying wooden railroad ties.

“I was definitely thinking about an explosion and East Palestine,” Jessica Washkowiak, an owner of the farm, told The Colorado Sun a few days after the fire. “I mean, if there was a spill here, it could wipe us out. It would completely ruin agriculture in Palisade.”

Environmental activists began labeling crude oil trains “bomb trains” in the wake of a series of fires and explosions involving petroleum products in the early 2010s. The worst occurred in 2013 in Quebec, Canada, when a train hauling light crude from North Dakota’s Bakken oil field derailed in the small town of Lac-Mégantic, resulting in an explosion that killed 47 people. Other explosions and major fires involving oil trains have occurred in Oregon, North Dakota, Alabama, West Virginia and elsewhere in Canada.

The Uinta Basin’s waxy crude is less volatile than other kinds of crude oil, making it less likely to cause an explosion, federal regulators wrote in an analysis. But even in minor rail accidents, they concluded, “there is a chance of ignition,” and in general, “accidents involving a loaded oil train could result in several different outcomes and associated consequences, depending on the force of the collision or derailment, the location of the accident, and the number of train cars involved.”

“Union Pacific has a robust emergency management plan in place that is activated in the event of an emergency,” Tysver said. “We also have Hazardous Materials Management teams placed regionally throughout our network to prevent, prepare, and respond to emergency events.”

As trains head east out of Palisade, the railroad again rejoins both I-70 and the Colorado River to wind through the rugged De Beque Canyon.

At this point, eastbound trains have traveled fewer than 50 miles into Colorado. The river and the railroad will continue to follow each other up the Western Slope of the Rocky Mountains for roughly another 150 miles, intertwined almost as far as the river’s headwaters, high up on the Continental Divide in Rocky Mountain National Park.

Fruit growers and oenophiles in Palisade could soon watch hundreds of oil tankers disappear daily around the bend into De Beque Canyon. But many will fear that one day, the oil in one or more of those cars could spill somewhere upriver and come right back — potentially into the canyon’s Cameo Diversion Dam, the main source of irrigation water in Palisade and most of the rest of Mesa County.

“There’s a lot of concern around the river, especially after East Palestine,” said Kate Christensen, a volunteer with Stop the Uinta Basin Railway, a coalition of Utah and Colorado environmental groups. “The Colorado River has obviously had just a ton of issues with quantity, and this could devastate its quality.”

Christensen repeated what has become a familiar refrain among activists seeking to block the project.

“It’s not if a train derails — it’s just when, and how often,” she said. “If we have multiple trains going through each day, it’s not like this is going to end up well…”

Read Part Three…