Once again, my apologies for not posting to this blog as often as previously.
Plans for a commuter railroad that has many of the characteristics of an interurban or intercity operation keep rolling forward along the east face of the Rocky Mountains. I just finished an article from the Pueblo Chieftain that talks about the plans for Passenger Rail on a north-south route through Denver and Pueblo.
We have blogged about this line in the past. It involves the vision and dream of two entities, the Rocky Mountain Rail Authority and the Colorado Rail Association. In its most basic form, the dream is to use existing right of way – a violation of the basic tenet “revamp nothing” – to schedule passenger service up and down the east slope with a north terminus in Wyoming and a south terminus in New Mexico. To this writer, this basic form alone makes this line an intercity route
This news article is the first in which we have seen an additional proposal to build a parallel freight line along a comparatively flat corridor in the eastern plains. Remember, you Eastern types, that the eastern plains are still high altitude, semi-arid and not as flat as central Illinois.
We suppose that adding the new freight line to the project will answer some of the objections the freight railroads would have to adding passenger trains to their tracks already operating at full capacity. In this case, the objectors would be the BNSF Railway and Union Pacific, owners of the so-called Joint Line between Denver and Pueblo (actually Trinidad, although with BNSF using Raton Pass as little as possible, the Pueblo-Raton segment sees little freight traffic).
This writer knows little about the attitude of the State of Wyoming towards this rail line. But Cheyenne and Laramie are closer to Denver than any point in New Mexico. Cheyenne is as close to Denver as Pueblo. We’d call the Wyoming people damnfools if they aren’t in favor of it. Cheyenne-Laramie to Pueblo makes a great little rail corridor with mileage and population on a par with San Luis Obispo-Los Angeles-San Diego and/or Chicago-Detroit.
We know that New Mexico – following its Governor and Presidentialist Bill Richardson – is in favor of it. (Presidentialist – noun – declared favorite-son presidential primary candidate with not a snowball’s chance of raising enough money to get the nomination, one of many candidates on the presidential list.) New Mexico already owns the BNSF Railway tracks and grade from Belen, NM through Raton to the border with Colorado. And we already have a train planned to go to Santa Fe from Belen. (Rail Runner, but not until 2010, probably.) But Santa Fe is more distant from Pueblo than Pueblo is from Denver, and there is a lot of nothing and slow mountain running between Raton and Santa Fe.
At least one of our blogs has dealt with the question of putting passengers on rail all the way from Santa Fe to El Paso and beyond.
CRA is shooting for an operational route by 2014-2015 when the Denver FasTracks is scheduled to begin.
Our next blog: How about a twist on this idea?
©2007 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com
1 comment:
Where does this philosophy of "revamp nothing" come from? Certainly there are times when it's cheaper, or cheaper in the long run, to build new. But incremental improvements are often easier to implement and easier to build in stages, which means they are more likely to happen. True, there are plenty of examples of legacy systems still in use that are not as efficient as current technology. But there is also a lot to be said for not forgetting lessons previously learned. I'd say almost all of Amtrak's big problems fit into this category. If there had been more respect or at least understanding for what had come before when Amtrak was formed, when Tom Downs came on board, when George Warrington tried to change Amtrak culture and fired all the best managers, when David Gunn dismantled everything Warrington did, even some positive changes . . . And then there are the environmental benefits of recycling.
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