Re: UP Closing Burnham Shops

Oh Beau,

You've been drinking too much Yellow and Gray Kool Ade. Yes, the new EPA regs have affected the Coal Line here in Wyoming as well. But we all saw it coming decades ago. Like most things, everybody said that it would never happen. When it did all of those who said that it couldn't happen are now saying "What Happened?". What happened was that there was an agency in the Federal Government that they couldn't buy off.

The D&RGW was a great competitor when it was run by Rio Grande Industries, but after Anschutz and the Final merger into UP, it is just a shadow of its former self.

The hump yard in Grand Junction was retired long before the EPA coal regs due to the lack of business, the Tennessee Pass line was Retired in Place, again not due to the EPA. Of course, thanks to the ATSF, the Joint Line was single tracked from Palmer Lake to Colorado Springs.

The UP didn't want the D&RGW, they wanted the SP line from Ogden to San Francisco.

One comment that I heard after the SP was absorbed from an official out of Omaha was. "We should have let the SP go belly-up and just Cherry-picked the lines that we wanted from the bankruptcy court."

Rick