Western Railroad Discussion > Moffat Tunnel Sub Traffic Levels (Week 6)

Hello!  

Here are some traffic levels for the UP Moffat Tunnel Sub from the sixth week of 2016 (1/31 to 2/6). You can see Week 5 levels by clicking here. These numbers are total train counts for the entire 24 hour period each day.

Total Trains: 41 (-21.2% from Week 5)  
Total Westbounds: 24 (-11.1% from Week 5) 
Total Eastbounds: 17 (-32.0% from Week 5)  

Breakdown By Day  
1/31: 6 trains (3 west, 3 east) 
2/01: 4 trains (3 west, 1 east) 
2/02: 8 trains (5 west, 3 east) 
2/03: 5 trains (3 west, 2 east)  West local ran this day and is not included in these numbers
2/04: 6 trains (3 west, 3 east) 
2/05: 7 trains (4 west, 3 east) 
2/06: 5 trains (3 west, 2 east) 

UP had been running some light power moves in January to clear out the closing Burnham Shops in Denver (moving power to Grand Junction). However, those moves are pretty well wrapped up and it can be seen! Not one day were there more than 3 eastbounds.

Happy train hunting!

Kevin Morgan
Arvada, CO
ColoradoRailfan.com



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/09/16 06:23 by ColoradoRailfan.

Well, I might as well post all of the ugly truth about this.  I'm going to be as blunt as possible, so that readers of the forum get a clear understanding of what is going on and what is very likely going to happen.  If one believes that the coal traffic is essentially  disappearing from the Moffat for the foreseeable future--and, sadly, I am of this opinion--then I recommend that railfans get as many photos as they can of the Moffat while it is still operating and ride the California Zephyr while it is still running on the Moffat, or running at all.   Here is how I think the events will "go down":

There will be an extensive and ongoing deferral of maintenance on the Moffat, extending all the way from Denver clear to Helper, Utah.  People with whom I'm acquainted who are "in the know" at the UP say this is already beginning in earnest.  Already, numerous maintenance activities have been "delayed" or "postponed"--translated, they are not going to happen.  Given the harsh natural environment for trackage, especially in Colorado, one can expect an entire crop of slow orders, lowered speed limits, and rough track to proliferate along the Moffat in pretty short order.   Over time, those will reach the point that Amtrak will no longer be able to make its schedule on the route and travel times for BNSF trackage rights trains will become excessive.  Amtrak will complain to the UP about it, and the UP's response to  Amtrak and the states of Colorado and Utah will be, "Put up or shut up."  Now, Colorado has shown  relatively scant support over the last 40 years for providing any state support for maintaining mainline or branchline freight or Amtrak railroad corridors in the state.  The state political leadership and the majority of the Colorado electorate apparently believe that a viable state rail transportation network anywhere outside of the Front Range Corridor--or any primary industry (agriculture, timbering, or resource extraction) for that matter--really isn't necessary for the economic health of the state.  That is dead wrong, in my opinion, but the state's actions (or inactions) speak louder than words and those actions affirm my view of Colorado's political "climate" toward rail transportation and primary industry.  So, state assistance to maintain Amtrak service on the Moffat is unlikely, in my opinion.  The result will be that Amtrak will either eventually re-route the California Zephyr off of the Moffat or discontinue it entirely.  As for BNSF, they are unlikely to continue to run trackage right trains over the Moffat if it takes 3 or 4 (or more) full crew shifts to get a train over the line, especially since, with the decline of coal and other traffic on their lines, they can probably absorb those few trains onto their north or south transcon routes without negative consequences.

Once that Amtrak and BNSF are no longer running on the Moffat, UP will simply take the line out of service.  What most people do not know (but I do, since I used to work in that field) is that Colorado property tax law is constructed such that a railroad does not really get a substantial tax benefit from abandoning and removing trackage.  The tax burden is simply apportioned differently within the various taxing entities in which the railroad runs.  So, the UP can leave a line in place (like Tennessee Pass) without significantly changing its tax liability within the state.   At first blush, this would seem advantageous to preserving rail corridors, since the trackage remains in place.  But, the big downside is that the railroad can hold onto the out-of-service trackage indefinitely, which prevents another railroad (BNSF, for example) from acquiring it and it pretty much hamstrings the Surface Transportation Board from having much to say about it..  It is sort of a "I'm not playing with my toy, but it's still mine, so you can't have it" philosophy.  Of course, over time, the rail trackage will physically deteriorate enough that no one would want it.  In that case, the UP has had its cake and eaten it, too.  It has avoided the operating expense of maintaining and operating a line that it doesn't want AND it has prevented its transfer to any competing railroad that might be more effectively able to use it.  Likely, that scenario provides enough financial benefits to the UP to override the scrap value it would get from tearing the line up.  Of course, nothing would prevent the UP from selling off any ancillary real estate that it owns other than the mainline right-of-way that would have a good liquidation value (read here: the Burnham Shop property, as a prime example). 

So, there you have it.  The UP is playing a masterful game of chess with its railroad operations in Colorado, and it is very close to reaching "check-mate" on being able to finally extinguish, in the 21st Century, that pesky railroad operation in Colorado that it could not exterminate in the previous 100 years.

WW Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> As for BNSF, they
> are unlikely to continue to run trackage right
> trains over the Moffat if it takes 3 or 4 (or
> more) full crew shifts to get a train over the
> line, especially since, with the decline of coal
> and other traffic on their lines, they can
> probably absorb those few trains onto their north
> or south transcon routes without negative
> consequences.

That doesn't get them to the Utah customers that those BNSF trains serve, however, so they would probably be required to move the BNSF trains to UP's route across Wyoming.  

Most BNSF traffic on the Moffat is too and from the Intermountain West... how would the BNSF get that traffic to its destination over the Transcon?  In peak traffic season the BNSF sometimes runs two healthy size trains each direction....



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/09/16 12:06 by jc76.

Agreed. Plus I don't think Amtrak would fold up shop on a cross country train just because the Rio Grande wasn't available, you can bet it would be on the UP mainline as well. No way UP wants either of them there. As it sits now UP has already made the investments in the line, good rail, concrete and new ties, ballast, basically brand new ctc across the entire line, at current traffic even with deferred maintenance it would probably take 30 years before the Moffat turned into a slow order riddled Milwaukee Road. I'm guessing we won't see any major maintenance projects for a while to be sure. Western Co has a lot of traffic potential in the right conditions. I'm thinking the Moffat is now in wait and see mode with it's 5-6 train days and will stay like this for a long time, or until new traffic materializes.

T

czephyr17 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> WW Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> -----
> > As for BNSF, they
> > are unlikely to continue to run trackage right
> > trains over the Moffat if it takes 3 or 4 (or
> > more) full crew shifts to get a train over the
> > line, especially since, with the decline of
> coal
> > and other traffic on their lines, they can
> > probably absorb those few trains onto their
> north
> > or south transcon routes without negative
> > consequences.
>
> That doesn't get them to the Utah customers that
> those BNSF trains serve, however, so they would
> probably be required to move the BNSF trains to
> UP's route across Wyoming.  

It seems that some people are imagining the UP is creating a top secret villanous strategy to close the Moffat. It's become the Y2K of Colorado rail fanning. The line is still seeing a healthy amount of tonnage, and as eatonm mentioned the UP has invested capital improvements into this line in the last few years. It's important to remember the Unitah Basin in Utah has a tremendous amount of oil that the UP could tap into, in fact it has already ran a few oil trains out of Wash, UT over the Moffat into Oklahoma. There are so many oppurtutnites for this line that it's a great asset for the UP to keep running. The freight trains traveling the Moffat are of a decent size & the UP has local traffic coming off the Craig branch as well.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/09/16 13:59 by mpaul101.

I believe BNSF now runs Denver -Grand Junction with one crew..... No more crew change at Kremmling....


The sand and oil (black wax) will be back.... I give it two years at best.....

Posted from iPhone



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 02/09/16 13:38 by jc76.

^Anyone familiar with the Moffat over the years knows that it is a very expensive chunk of railroad to maintain.  In the Grande days, that was a necessary evil, since the route was, along with Tennessee Pass, its mainline.  It isn't a "conspiracy" that the UP would likely shed itself  of the Moffat (probably by "mothballing" it out of service as it has with TP)  if coal traffic doesn't come back--it's just hard business sense.  When the Rio Grande emerged from bankruptcy in the late 1930's, it knew that it could not survive on locally originated traffic alone, it had to carry "bridge" traffic.  It spent years fighting the "Ogden Gateway" issue before the ICC to get a share of the pie of transcontinental traffic.  In the deregulated environment after Staggers, the D&RGW essentially knew that it could not, over the long run, survive on its own, so it sought marriage with the SP as a way (among a lot of other things) to assure itself of bridge traffic.  The long-term death knell for Tennessee Pass and the Moffat came when the Surface Transportation Board did not demand, as a condition of the UP/SP merger, that the BNSF be granted full trackage rights from the West Coast to Kansas City (or at least Pueblo) over Tennessee Pass.  The UP wanted no part of that and put tremendous political pressure on the STB not to make that stipulation part of the merger agreement.  One of the things that the UP did was to make a guarantee to the State of Colorado that it would keep Burnham open for some number of years if Colorado would not oppose the merger of the UP and SP.  I saw some of that political intrigue firsthand, and the ploy worked.

The UP will likely keep the Moffat open and "allow" Amtrak to use the route for some period of time, but one can bet that the UP will not make any special effort to keep the line in first-class condition for Amtrak.  They have no financial incentive to do so.  As for the coal traffic, I do hope that more sane heads will prevail in Washington and that coal will be recognized, albeit with its limitations, as a critical part of the nations energy mix, rather than as a passe fuel that has no place in US energy policy.  The hard part about that is that most lay people who are not familiar with coal mining do not understand that, once a coal mine is shut down, even for a short period of time, it can be difficult to impossible to economically put it back into production.  If the coal mines that provide traffic for the Moffat are closed down for any extended period, it is unlikely that most of them will ever produce again.  I'm sure that the UP is keeping a close eye on that.

One of the "lot of other things", and a BIG one, was Phil Anshutz's desire to pick-up all that SP right a way to build his fiber optics network. Once accomplished, his railroad was disposable.

why would any class 1 railroad would continue to operate an expensive piece of mountain railroad once their traffic base (coal) disappears, has few on-line industries, and the route is prohibited from running any doublestack trains on the line due to tunnel clearance issues, especially if the few manifest trains currently running could easily be re-routed?

66

^Absolutely true about the Moffat.  One of the reasons that the UP steadfastly refused to make any concession that would have allowed BNSF to have trackage rights over Tennessee Pass is that the Royal Gorge Route could (and did) handle doublestacks, and it was a direct connection to what was essentially a water level route on the BNSF almost all the way to Kansas City east of Pueblo along the Arkansas River, unlike either the old undulating Missouri Pacific route east of Pueblo on the UP, or out of Denver on the old Burlington through eastern Colorado and western Nebraska.

And this is why the Feds should have never, ever, ever allowed UP to take control of this line.  It was built in its original days to COMPETE with the UP, not become part of it.  BNSF should have been allowed to get this line years ago when the chance was there.  I know I'm simplifying it all, but this is what happens when you have a monopoly--less service, less competition, and stagnation.

The Feds royally blew it during the merger proceedings, and years before that.  They didn't see "the big picture."

I agree with other posters here that this is probably the bottom here and that without any changes to coal, oil, potash, etc, the Moffat Line will continue to operate as it is now.  There is too much on line traffic, and potential for more in the future.  UP will probably reduce maintenance projects, but there's also less need of that now without the constant pounding of coal trains.

As for the BNSF side of things, they never really wanted the Tennessee Pass line.  Yes, it could handle double stacks, but only international containers.  The former DRGW did not have clearances for double stack domestic containers, which is increasingly becoming the mainstay now days.  Tennessee Pass doesn't fit, especially with it's severe grades and costs, with BNSF traffic patterns - it doesn't need it.

The BNSF, for the most part, does NOT use it's UP trackage rights on the central corridor for it's overhead traffic; that all is routed on its' "Transcon" line (ie former ATSF).  That routing is faster, more capacity, and fewer mountain grades.  In addition, and this is a big one, UP charges a big fee for the trackage rights that BNSF uses, which also adds a deterrent for the BNSF not to run overhead traffic via this route.  As such, the business that the BNSF trains carry on the Moffat is "local" traffic for their trackage rights business (ie Grand Junction area, Salt Lake City area, etc).

The STB isn't just going to let UP shut down the line either; UP still must provide service per it's common carrier mandate.  Also, per the UP/SP merger requirements, BNSF must also be allowed to provide competitive service in this corridor.  I'm sure BNSF isn't going to want to maintain operations into western Colorado/eastern Utah AND through Wyoming.

Many comparisons have been made here with the Moffat and the former Clinchfield that CSX has mothballed.  It is important to note that the closed part of the former Clinchfield has NO on line traffic.  Though through traffic has been rerouted, CSX continues to provide "service" (such that it may be, but that's typical with all Class one's) over the rest of the former Clinchfield.

WW Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> ^Absolutely true about the Moffat.  One of the
> reasons that the UP steadfastly refused to make
> any concession that would have allowed BNSF to
> have trackage rights over Tennessee Pass is that
> the Royal Gorge Route could (and did) handle
> doublestacks, and it was a direct connection to
> what was essentially a water level route on the
> BNSF almost all the way to Kansas City east of
> Pueblo along the Arkansas River, unlike either the
> old undulating Missouri Pacific route east of
> Pueblo on the UP, or out of Denver on the old
> Burlington through eastern Colorado and western
> Nebraska.

The irony here is that BNSF has never and does not now have any interest in operating over Tennessee Pass, then over the La Junta sub with stack trains.  

i thought there was a potash(?) spur w/of green river and some business w/of denver before the curves of the front range start that the u.p. still serves.  other than that, how many other "on-line" businesses (excluding coal load-outs) are on the moffat line between denver and provo?

66

RollinB Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------

> The irony here is that BNSF has never and does not
> now have any interest in operating over Tennessee
> Pass, then over the La Junta sub with stack
> trains.  

Whether BNSF did or would have any interest in TP, the UP slammed the door on any possibility of it from the day the ink was still wet on the UP/SP merger.  There were some shortline people back in 1997 with a concept to run a Montana Rail Link kind of operation from Grand Junction to Pueblo or even across the old MP to  make a BNSF link possible, but the UP blocked that by keeping the Dotsero-Sage line in service and refusing to grant anyone trackage rights across it or the rest of the Royal Gorge Route from Grand Junction to Pueblo.  Whatever any other railroads thought about the practicality of a Central Corridor link over TP, the UP made sure that it would never happen.  I'm certain that when or if the UP decides that it no longer will operate the Moffat, it will employ a similar tactic to make sure that no one can get any potential benefit out of it.

think grand junction stills gets gasoline from denver

goneon66 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> i thought there was a potash(?) spur w/of green
> river and some business w/of denver before the
> curves of the front range start that the u.p.
> still serves.  other than that, how many other
> "on-line" businesses (excluding coal
> load-outs) are on the moffat line between denver
> and provo?
>
> 66

Off the top of my head from my last trip:

The Gyspum plant  (in gypsum) (1 or 2x a week)
Glenwood Springs (LPG?)
Lacy (2 loadouts for cement and other?) decent amount of cars.
Parachute has the soda plant (good amount of cars)
Grand Junction - Cars from the 1x a week Montrose (10-20?), Cars from the 1x a week Moab local (15-20?), other industries west of GJ.
Price - Some LPG loads?

I'm sure I'm missing a few smaller ones.

Enough traffic for a train a day each way (most days). BNSF siphons off some of the traffic at GJ.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/10/16 08:57 by donner_dude1.

Just on the BNSF side of things, BNSF services customers in the Grand Junction area at Durham CO for Sun Corp Energy USA and at Parachute CO for Solvay Chemical.

As for UP, I know there are local businesses in the Grand Junction area for them as well.  UP also has a number of customers between Dotsero and Grand Junction too.  If the oil/gas drilling continues, this has also been a huge business for UP in western/central Colorado, not to mention outbound oil (which as mentioned, willl probably come back in the future).


goneon66 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> i thought there was a potash(?) spur w/of green
> river and some business w/of denver before the
> curves of the front range start that the u.p.
> still serves.  other than that, how many other
> "on-line" businesses (excluding coal
> load-outs) are on the moffat line between denver
> and provo?
>
> 66

jc76 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I believe BNSF now runs Denver -Grand Junction
> with one crew..... No more crew change at
> Kremmling....

You are correct.  Pool based in GJ.  Grand Junction to Denver.  There is a small dogcatch board based in Denver.  They are making it 90% of the time.