UP: No thanks to Calif. public funds for Donner Pass rail upgrades
Omaha, Neb.-based Class I railroad Union Pacific has formally withdrawn a major freight route upgrade project in the Donner Pass from consideration for state of California public funding, citing state insistence that the freight project also include passenger capacity.
UP officials, in a Sept. 5 letter to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, said that while the railroad would no longer seek funds from the state Trade Corridors Improvement Fund for the project, UP still planned to use its own money to fund the estimated $90 million project.
The California Transportation Commission had already approved $43 million in state matching funds for the project, money that the railroad now claims had strings attached that it could not live with.
'During the course of our many discussions on the Donner Project, it became evident that a prerequisite for TCIF funding was a broader discussion on transportation corridor enhancements, particularly passenger rail,' wrote James Young, UP president and chief executive officer.
The state had hoped to use the Donner Pass UP route to increase Amtrak's Sacramento-area Capitol Corridor service to Reno, Nev., that lies just east of the pass.
According to the letter, UP believes the project must remain an exclusively freight corridor and believes that the intent of the TCIF program was to support goods movement. The railroad also said that any public benefit from the project must come from reduced freight rail congestion, enhanced rail velocity and increased freight rail throughput.
'Unfortunately, it seems we have come to the point where our respective teams are unable to agree on how to define and quantify the public benefits for this project absent additional passenger rail service,' Young wrote.
In addition, studies completed during the preparation of the project revealed that by modifying the original scope of the project, UP could cost effectively finance the efficiency-related aspects of the project without the public TCIF money.
'The capacity related improvements that had been envisioned by the Donner Project may still be added incrementally in the future as volumes and growth of freight traffic dictate,' Young wrote.
Donner Pass, about 90 miles northeast of the state capitol in Sacramento, was the site of the first railroad track to cut through the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Known as one of the most formidable railroad mountain crossings, the Overland Route features an extremely long 96-mile eastbound grade rising from the nearly sea-level floor of the California Central Valley to the 7,085-foot-high Donner summit.
Opened in 1869 by the Central Pacific Railroad and later double-tracked in 1925, the original Overland Route — including miles of tunnels, snow sheds and several massive retaining walls — remained in use until 1993 when CPR-successor Southern Pacific, in a cost-saving move, pulled up nearly seven miles of the first and oldest summit grade track.
However, the glory days of the Donner Pass route were already gone. By the early 1980s, Southern Pacific's partner UP had shifted all but a handful of daily trains from the Donner Pass route over the Sierra Nevada to its Salt Lake City — Bay Area line through Feather River Canyon — a route adding 75 miles of additional travel time.
Within only a few years of the UP merger with Southern Pacific in 1996, intermodal traffic had begun to increase out of the Port of Oakland, and it became clear as the port traffic grew that the SP decision to remove portions of the original Donner Pass track had created a major bottleneck at the pass summit.
Today, all traffic on the route, east and west, must travel along a single track for several miles at the summit including through the 10,322-foot-long 'Big Hole' tunnel.
An additional problem is that the Big Hole tunnel, also built in the mid 1920s, is not tall enough to accommodate double-stacked container cars or tri-level car carriers.
While UP could retrack the original route removed by Southern Pacific, this 98-mile-long route relies on snow sheds instead of tunnels and is more at risk of closure from the harsh winter snowfalls experienced in the Donner Pass. Many of the cutouts on this route are also not high enough to accommodate modern intermodal trains and would require either lowering the track bed or adding height to the cuts.
Currently, eastbound double-stacked intermodal trains from the Port of Oakland are sent to UP's Roseville Yard about 20 miles northeast of Sacramento and then switched to single-stacked cars before heading through the pass. ' Keith Higginbotham