(The following article by Alicia Caldwell and John Ingold was posted on the Denver Post website on November 17.)
ARVADA, Colo. — Many Arvadans have had their fill of the “Beer Train.”
A half-dozen times a day, freight trains that primarily serve the Coors brewery chug across the city’s busiest street, stopping traffic and leaving roads snarled for half an hour.
The railroad always has been part of the rhythm of Arvada, but in recent years this city of 102,000 has grown too busy to tolerate such disruptions. The city is proposing a $17.8 million underpass so that freight trains and cars no longer would get in each other’s way.
Such conflicts are on the rise across Colorado.
In Brighton, Union Pacific trains block every crossing in the city up to a dozen times a day, meaning firefighters and paramedics responding to emergency calls sometimes have to wait for trains to pass.
In Commerce City, city planners want to balance railroads’ vital service with the city’s industrial base and the new growth of homeowners, who want peace and quiet.
And in Douglas County, residents have pushed authorities in the last decade to build costly flyovers over railroad tracks after several high-profile and horrific train-car accidents.
State and local officials also are looking at expensive ways to separate urban life and freight trains, including moving rail lines east of the Front Range and onto the plains.
During the past century, railroads were instrumental in making Denver a metropolitan area. And while the area has grown too busy to live with freights, it still relies on them for deliveries of new cars, coal for electricity and food, among other goods.
Many growing suburbs are simply stuck with the trains.
“What we’re saddled with, if we can’t move them out of here, we have to figure out how to live with them,” said Brighton Mayor Jan Pawlowski. “If we hadn’t had the trains in the beginning, we probably wouldn’t be what we are today. But ours goes right through the middle of town, and as we’ve grown, it creates a major problem.”
Of paramount concern to every city is safety.
Despite annual fluctuations, the overall numbers for train-car collisions in metro area counties have moved upward during the past five years, mirroring a statewide trend, according to federal statistics.
The accident that critically injured 16-year-old Douglas County High School student Maureen Martin, whose car was hit by a train in Castle Rock last year, galvanized the community and prompted calls for moving railroad crossings.
In response, Castle Rock plans to build an $8.5 million roadway overpass at the busy intersection where the accident occurred.
Last month, at an intersection near Sedalia, a Colorado Springs woman was seriously injured in a collision with a train.
Industry representatives say that accident numbers are small and are increasing far more slowly than the numbers of cars on the road and freight trains on the rails. For instance, the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway claims its rate of grade-crossing collisions has declined by 47 percent – from 5.41 per million train miles in 1995 to a rate of 2.89 in 2002.
“We think we’ve made some progress on that, particularly given that rail traffic has increased so much,” said John Bromley, spokesman for Union Pacific Railroad, a major freight line in Colorado.
Brighton’s police and fire departments say they have experienced occasional situations where the passing train prevents them from getting from one side to the other. Union Pacific’s Bromley said if the train is stopped, the crews have an emergency number to call to get the train moving again.
But officials say it’s usually easier to just wait for trains to pass.
Carl Craigle, head of Brighton’s Platte Valley Medical Center’s paramedics, said the train hasn’t caused major problems in recent years. The last time a train delayed ambulance crews, he said, was three months ago. But it turned out the alarm was false.
Still, Pawlowski said it’s the potential that something serious could happen that scares her. The Greater Brighton Fire Protection District is building new stations on the eastern and western fringes of town, mostly to accommodate growth in the area. But the stations also will increase flexibility should a crew from one station not be able to cross the tracks, Craigle said.
For safety reasons as well as others, the Colorado Department of Transportation recently commissioned a $450,000 study to look at building 90 miles of new tracks as part of a plan to move freight lines east, away from the Front Range and onto the plains. The existing lines would be converted for shorter, quicker commuter trains.
“It’s not just people in cars and the public in general who are frustrated with all the train traffic coming through Denver,” said Tom Mauser, a CDOT planning manager. “Railroads have that frustration, too.”
Bromley said Union Pacific, which moves about 40 trains a day through Colorado, would support such a move if it doesn’t negatively affect freight traffic or growth.
“It’s going to be expensive,” he said. “If the public will is there to do that, we think it’s fine.”
Mauser said he didn’t know how much such a relocation would cost. The wild card, he said, is the cost of buying right of way and building grade separations, which is what Arvada is contemplating.
But for most people, the problem with trains in a busy area is simply gut-level annoyance.
When the train rolls through Brighton, cars back up for blocks in either direction.
“The train always seems to come at choice times, morning rush hour, evening rush hour,” Pawlowski said. “… Some move very slowly through our community. It becomes very aggravating to people just sitting there in cars waiting for the train to clear.”
Just separating the tracks from the road, like two fighting 5- year-olds, seems to be the cleanest solution for many cities.
A study commissioned by Arvada proposes an underpass at the Wadsworth Boulevard Bypass and Grandview Avenue. An environmental impact study is underway.
Pawlowski said she would like to see some kind of over- or underpass – what is known as a grade separation – in Brighton, too.
Littleton officials came to the same conclusion a couple of decades ago. Projections were that freight traffic would increase to 100 trains a day, and safety was a concern, said Jim Woods, Littleton city manager.
“There was a lot of disruption to the community,” Woods said.
A half-dozen railroad crossing projects were undertaken, Woods said, some with the railroad tracks going over the roads, some with them passing under. The costs were shared by the state and the city, he said.
Modifying the railroad crossings took about 20 years, but it made a significant difference in the quality of life, Woods said.
Douglas County also built a grade separation at the intersection of U.S. 85 and Titan Road, where six teenagers died in a collision with a train in 1995.
Lena Kent, spokesperson for the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway, said the company has worked with communities across the country to close 1,800 crossings. That means the street leading to the crossing is closed.
“The best way to engineer out some of the risk is to take the crossing out,” Kent said.
Not all crossings are suited for such significant changes. In Brighton, for instance, the approach to a highway overpass for one major crossing would obscure access to main street businesses.
Then there’s the money. Union Pacific’s Bromley estimates it costs $25 million to $30 million to build a grade separation. And Pawlowski said railroads rarely chip in funding for a grade separation.
“They’ve been there first, and they’re not moving,” Pawlowski said of the railroads.