Hi Rick,
I spent most all of my free time between 1989 and 1996 coordinating a disparate group of Wyoming and Colorado interests, led by a Wyoming state senator from Laramie, in protesting the abandonment of the WyCo. We had a chance to buy the Colorado side of the line from Walden to the state line for $1.2M, but the State of Colorado dropped the ball at the last minute. Ownership of the Colorado portion would have automatically forestalled abandonment of the Wyoming side. But I managed to help these folks to stretch out what should have been an automatic 60-day exemption filing for 6-1/2 years. Not shabby for a beginner's effort. Unfortunately, the abandonment locked up what was estimated by geologists to be 5 billion tons of the lowest-sulfur coal in North America. Stupid, stupid!!!
I was working with the mine, which faced a 10-cent-per-ton price penalty versus UP's own Hanna coal, mostly because of transportation costs. While the mining was suspended at the time the railroad was abandoned, the company was aggressively pursuing a radical design for a laser-guided long-wall machine that would have mined vertically instead of horizontally; this would have brought down production costs and make the coal more competitive. This radical design was necessitated by the fact that the coal beds in Jackson County are tipped up on edge; normal long-wall mining is useless. The target market was Midwestern power plants, which would have mixed the low-sulfur Walden coal with a high-sulfur local coal to meet EPA requirements. The utilities were interested, but not at the price we would have delivered the coal to them.
The high transportation costs were occasioned by two factors. First was the usual massive snows that plague all Rocky Mountain railroads, but which seem to be singularly bad in the Snowy Range. The WyCo should have been a rotary plow road, but they owned nothing more that a wedge plow. For a while they would borrow (read: rent) one of the UP's rotaries. But in the last couple of years WyCo just decided it was not worth the effort to plow, and the line was shut down in the winter. We even talked with them about creating a coal stockpile in Laramie to help bridge the winter months, but nothing came of the idea.
The second problem was those otherwise beautiful Albany Loops, combined with the 2-1/2% grade. The Loop gradient was uncompensated, so it probably had an effective grade of 3-1/2 to 4%. The curves themselves were so tight that a train of anything more than about 35 cars would "stringline", dumping the train into the inside of a curve. Therefore, with a standard 105-car train, it was necessary to
triple the hill! Between the weather and the Albany Loops, this was one expensive railroad to operate.
Should the WyCo have been built in the first place? Probably not. Having built it, should it have been preserved? Yes. We don't know the future for coal in power generation. But the worst case scenario should have been to mothball the line under the ownership of the two states, perform minimal track maintenance as needed, and wait for the day when all of that very-low-sulfur coal might be in high demand. That was a vision that politicians and bureaucrats in the two states (especially Wyoming) couldn't understand.
About the excursion train.... I think it could have survived with good management and far better marketing. As for the sterile scenery between Laramie and Centennial, well, to my Westerner's eye, it has a special beauty that only high-elevation deserts can have. Actually, it is much the same as the terrain out of Antonito, which does not seem to be an inhibiting factor for the C&TS. Beyond Centennial, the WyCo line was spectacular, again in its own way, and I think it could favorably compete with our friends in southwestern Colorado. And unlike the C&TS and the D&S, home base for the Wyco was on a major Interstate highway (I-80). Remember, it is all about location, location, location.
But that's all sad history now. The WyCo very likely could never be rebuilt. The cost would be high, but more importantly, the line had mostly revisionary easements for the corridor, the Forest Service and the Bureau of land Management being the biggest adjacent property owners. Piecing together the right-of-way again would literally take an act of Congress.
All of the foregoing is an object lesson of what happens when states do
not have coherent rail transportation plans, including a system for dealing with rail abandonments. Western states in particular are almost wholly unprepared to respond to an abandonment filing.
End of lecture. Test on Friday.
Mike
PS. I should have mentioned that the Wyco operated two different sets of passenger cars over the lifetime of their ownership. The first set consisted of cars leased from an abortive attempt to start an excursion train on the Aspen branch of the D&RGW (they forgot a minor detail: ask the railroad first!). The second set I found for them before things turned sour; it consisted of a set of pre-WW2 Santa Fe
El Capitan Budd stainless cars. Came from a closed operation in Oklahoma (as I remember). The Albany Loops curves were so bad that the WyCo had the ICC car inspector after the railroad for damage to the car trucks.
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 08/18/2009 12:34PM by mikerowe.
