Light rail's freight expectations still alive
Passengers may ride next to cargo trains on non-DIA routes
Kevin Flynn, Rocky Mountain News
Published July 26, 2006 at midnight
Union Pacific Railroad won't allow RTD to use light rail for its train service to Denver International Airport, citing safety concerns, but planners are still considering light rail for other active freight lines in the metro area.
In the FasTracks corridor to DIA, Union Pacific would allow heavier commuter rail service, with cars that are built more like standard railroad passenger cars. Commuter rail cars are considered much safer than light-rail cars in crashes.
But the FasTracks program still could end up with light-rail cars next to freight trains in two other new corridors.
There are nine FasTracks rail corridors in the metro area. Three existing ones are to be extended, and six are new.
Of those six new ones, four would be built alongside existing freight rail tracks, one of which is the DIA train. Of the other three, the Northwest Rail Corridor paralleling U.S. 36 to Boulder and on to Longmont already has been selected to use the heavier commuter rail rather than light rail.
That choice wasn't made because of safety factors but because of cost and operating considerations - commuter rail is faster and less expensive over long hauls. The Boulder-Longmont line is 38 miles long.
But the other two corridors - the 18-mile North Metro through Commerce City and Thornton, and the 11.2-mile Gold Line to Arvada and Wheat Ridge - still have light rail as an option.
Union Pacific owns the corridor that would be used for North Metro. Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway owns the Gold Line and U.S. 36 corridor rights-of-way.
Union Pacific made the choice on the East Corridor to DIA because smaller light-rail cars don't meet federal standards for crash resistance with freight trains, while the heavier commuter rail cars do.
The Federal Railroad Administration has said that light-rail cars do not meet its crash standards, and refers to them as "non-compliant" vehicles.
Union Pacific spokesman James Barnes said that the railroad doesn't have a hard and fast rule about the issue. In fact, while the railroad nixed light rail on the airport line in November, it said it was agreeable to allowing light rail on one of its lesser used freight lines that would serve the North Metro corridor.
"Our priority will go to freight," Barnes said. "A lot of the decision is based on traffic flows on our rail system and our ability to move trains efficiently."
The high frequency and number of freight trains on the DIA corridor helped lead to Union Pacific's decision against light rail there.
The railroad was involved in a deadly commuter-rail crash last year. On Jan. 26, 2005, a man said to be suicidal pulled a vehicle onto a track in Glendale, Calif., north of Los Angeles, shortly before a Metrolink commuter train approached. The man fled before the crash, but the train smashed into the vehicle and derailed. It hit a Union Pacific freight train parked on a siding and also collided with an oncoming commuter train. Eleven people were killed. The man faces trial for murder.
Union Pacific's tracks on the East Corridor include 12 at-grade street crossings where cars can enter the tracks.
Liz Rao, the Regional Transportation District's FasTracks director, said that railroads want to minimize the possibility of people getting onto the tracks.
"You're trying to prevent that sort of thing from happening," she said of the Glendale accident. Using heavier commuter-rail passenger cars on freight corridors with grade crossings helps to minimize risk.
Union Pacific's decision derailed community and business efforts to have RTD consider using light rail to DIA. That's because light rail's better starting and stopping characteristics would allow for more stations to serve the neighborhoods and commercial districts along the 23.6-mile East Corridor that parallels Interstate 70.
But for RTD, it was spared a major budget headache. Since the original FasTracks plan assumed commuter rail would be used on the East Corridor, the budget allocated $701.2 million to it. Building the line as light rail instead would have cost an estimated $945 million, a cost increase of nearly $244 million that wasn't provided in the FasTracks budget.
Similar budget pressure would have hit the U.S. 36 project if light rail hadn't been ruled out there. And the same issue arises as the North Metro study gets under way next month. It had been planned as commuter rail, not light rail.
But the Gold Line has been projected to be light rail, and its budget reflects the higher cost of that choice. Its study also is just getting under way, and using commuter rail hasn't been ruled out there.
Burlington Northern Santa Fe so far hasn't ruled out light rail on the Gold Line. In fact, a spokeswoman said, there are safe ways to operate light rail in a freight corridor, as RTD currently does on the Littleton line.
"A barrier or greater distances between tracks may be one of several ways to further enhance the safe operation of non-compatible services in the same corridor," Lena Kent said.
RTD engineer Henry Stopplecamp said that increased distance between light-rail and freight tracks will help. On the East Corridor, RTD's tracks will be 25 to 70 feet away from Union Pacific's freight tracks.
RTD already operates its existing light-rail system in one of the busiest freight railroad corridors in the Front Range, the Santa Fe Drive corridor where Union Pacific and BNSF run 30 trains a day, mostly coal shipments.
That light-rail line opened six years ago after planning began in the 1970s, and railroads made no objections to running non-compliant light-rail vehicles while that plan was being developed.
There has been at least one derailment of a freight train on the southwest corridor since light rail started running. The incident disrupted transit service briefly while a freight car was lifted back onto its track, but there was no crash.
Union Pacific didn't operate in the southwest corridor at the time light rail was first planned. The tracks belonged to the former Santa Fe Railroad and the Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad. D&RGW merged with Southern Pacific in 1988, and that was merged into the Union Pacific in 1996.
But RTD already had purchased the tracks it needed in 1993.
Santa Fe merged with Burlington Northern in 1995.
RTD's planning for rail transit began much earlier than that. In the late 1970s, RTD paid to widen the construction of the railroad underpass in downtown Littleton to preserve space for a future rail transit line. It was part of the project to lower the freight tracks into a depression and eliminate Littleton's Main Street train crossing.
Union Pacific's tracks in the East Corridor are part of the original Kansas Pacific connection in 1870 to Denver. It operates six freight trains a day on it but that's expected to grow to 11 a day by 2030.
On the North Metro Corridor, which consists of part of Union Pacific's Boulder Branch, virtually no trains operate, so there isn't much safety conflict that would call for barring light rail.
The other two FasTracks corridors that use active freight lines belong to the BNSF Railway. On the Boulder-Longmont line, the railroad operates four trains a day. The Gold Line uses BNSF's Golden Branch, serving Coors brewery, with four trains a day.
Dodging a bullet
RTD was spared a budget headache by the decision to prohibit light rail on the FasTracks corridor to DIA.
$701 million was allocated for commuter rail on the corridor.
$945 million would have been needed to build the line as light rail.
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