Brief by Central Staff
Transportation – July 2003 – Colorado Central Magazine
Will trains ever run across Tennessee Pass again? Don’t bet on it, according to Mark W. Hemphill, who wrote a long article about the route in the June edition of Trains magazine.
“Since 1997, the rails over Tennessee Pass have rusted,” he wrote, and “In all likelihood, only one train will ever run over it again: the one that will pick up the rails.”
The rails in question extend about 170 miles from Canon City to Dotsero, east of Glenwood Springs. It’s all out of service, except for about a dozen miles from Canon City through the Royal Gorge, which offers tourist excursions.
Hemphill’s long article delves into the history and economics of the route through the Rockies, and with its Missouri Pacific connection at Pueblo, and Western Pacific connection at Ogden, Utah. It’s one of those lines that “live in purgatory because the case for their operation or abandonment isn’t clear-cut.”
He points out that it was an unlikely transcontinental corridor in the first place, and that it was an expensive, slow route on account of the steep grade from Minturn to the Tennessee Pass tunnel at 10,221 feet above sea level — the highest point on a mainline railroad in North America.
As recently as 1996, following the merger between the Southern Pacific and the Denver & Rio Grande Western, the route was busy with 20 trains a day.
But after those lines were merged with the Union Pacific that year, UP gave up on the Tennessee Pass corridor, and routed trains elsewhere. But even though UP took the line out of service, it hasn’t pulled up the rails, and hasn’t announced any plans, one way or another, for the corridor.
Hemphill notes that UP would be unlikely to sell the line to another operator, since that would bring a competitor into its territory. Increased coal production might cause UP to consider re-opening Tennessee Pass, since the Moffat line from the West Slope to Denver is running near capacity.
But the most likely scenario, Hemphill concludes, is abandonment.
(The June edition of Trains may still be available if you ask at the Book Mine in Leadville. The Salida Regional Library subscribes to it. There is a magazine web site, www.trainsmag.com, which has some material from back issues, but as we went to press, the Tennessee Pass article was not available there. The edition can be purchased for $4.95 plus shipping and handling at 1-800-533-6644, the publisher’s customer-service department.)