GJEP and partners have long touted that an upgraded railyard in Grand Junction with the ability to load and unload cargo freight could have significant and positive impact on the West Slope economy. Currently, several companies have to go through the expensive and impractical practice of unloading in Denver or Salt Lake City, and utilize trucks to bring cargo back and forth to rural Colorado. However, a new study conducted in partnership between GJEP, the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade and the Department of Transportation, is expected to lay the groundwork for negotiating new terms with local rail lines. Jason Blevins with The Colorado Sun dove into the freight issues on the Western Slope – and the possible solution:
“’It would be huge; an absolute game-changer for the Western Slope,’ if rail owners Union Pacific and Burlington Northern Santa Fe would stop freight trains in Grand Junction for loading and unloading shipping containers, said Robin Brown, the head of the Grand Junction Economic Partnership. That group is tasked with luring and retaining more businesses in the Grand Valley.
Many businesses on the Western Slope that use overseas manufacturing rely on intermodal transportation terminals in Denver and Salt Lake City, the hubs where rail cars carrying shipping containers sent from overseas manufacturing plants are unloaded into nearby warehouses and distribution centers. With the spiking costs of tariffs, a global scarcity of shipping containers and a shortage of truck drivers, the lack of a rail yard that can unload shipping containers is pinching many rural businesses…
Bobby Noyes is ready for a rail yard in Grand Junction to unload shipping containers. Noyes used to make all his RockyMount racks in the U.S. But increasingly technical manufacturing requirements and specific materials became too difficult to handle stateside, so he turned to factories in Asia.
Now, the entrepreneur who founded his bike-rack and lock company in Boulder in 1995 and recently moved his operation to Grand Junction, is turning to Utah for help that can’t be found on the Western Slope…
It’s not like Grand Junction hasn’t been asking railroad owners to stop freight trains at the local rail yard. It’s a common request every time someone at Union Pacific or Burlington Northern Santa Fe picks up the phone. But the train operators need a specific shipping volume in a region to add a new intermodal facility to the two operators’ roughly 60 intermodal hubs across the country.
But no one is absolutely sure how much freight is moving across Western Colorado. The Federal Highway Administration estimated 420 million tons of products were moved into, out of and around Colorado in 2016. That’s up from 78.6 million tons of products moved into, from and within the state in 2014, according to Colorado’s 2018 freight and passenger rail plan…
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