In 2012, Union Pacific has clearly started to prefer the Donner line for Container and other priority traffic moving to and from the West Coast, Now that the line has been cleared for Doublestacks, it’s shortened length and long stretches of double track appear, to offset the Winter weather and tougher grades compared to Feather River’s single track and mud/rock slides.
But that’s 2012 after 16 years of time and money spent on the line.
In 1996, which would have been the preferrable route.
Let’s suppose that for whatever reason, a condition of the SP sale was that UP couldn’t own both routes, only Feather River or Donner.
Which would UP have chosen?
Clearly they put a lot of work into the Feather River Route since they had bought it. Donner was in worse condition as SP rushed materials and manpower down to the sunset route. Donner could only clear single stack container trains negating it’s shorter distance and double track. Both still had winter weather issues.
So, if forced to choose only one, which would UP have chosen?
And now, suppose that UP would have trackage rights on the line they didn’t choose. So for instance if they chose Donner, they could still run Double stacks down the canyon sub until Donner was rebuilt.
Donner is still by far the superior route between the two. I believe the entire Donner Pass route was double track at one time so "undoing’ SP’s single tracking would be far cheaper than trying to double track or increase siding lengths in the Feather River Canyon. Also while the Feather River Route’s ruling grade is half of that of Donner’s, it’s still a slow go through the Canyon so any time savings due to a lesser ruling grade is minor at best. Donner’s shorter route with a manageable 2% grade is preferable.
UP spent a lot of money upgrading the Feather River route because that was there only route into Northern California and at the time they weren’t in the market to buy SP. Even if UP wanted to own the Donner Pass route even after buying WP, they still had to carry on business as usual which meant maintaining and ensuring the Feather River Route could handle UP’s traffic. If that meant spending a lot of money to upgrade the route, then that’s what they had to do to keep the trains rolling and business growing.
I agree with what you’ve said, but you ignore the fact that Donner needed all it’s tunnels notched and the floors lowered to clear doublestacks. Even after they got Donner, it took them the better part of 15 years to bring it up to fall service.
Now obviously, in that case, they had both, so there was no pressure to move quickly on Donner, but still. Is it a case of a Bird in the Hand?
I respectfully disagree that it took 15 years. Once the decision to upgrade Donner Pass route, which I believe came at least 10 years after they owned it, how long did the actual process take?.
There is no way to determine the answer you are asking because only the decision makers know the reason for that. After acquiring the SP, they had to do a lot of repairs because the SP was not in good shape. Then the question becomes where should capital money be invested first? Another is did they even have the capital to invest? UP might have delayed the process if they sought federal/state “subsidies” to help fund the project like in the case of the CSX Heartland Corridor or the NS Crescent Corridor. Washington or Sacramento just doesn’t issues checks immediately after a company like NS or CSX asked for money… it’s a long slow process that may or may not produce funds.
In my opinion, the real prize in acquiring SP was the Sunset Route. Between California and Texas/Southeast, the Sunset is the best route compared to the BNSF route so there was big money to be made there by upgrading that route. The only reason BNSF was able to really successful in that corridor is because SP didn’t have capital to upgrade the Sunset to compete. Between Northern California and the Midwest, UP’s acquisition of SP gave them a monopoly on the route so there is no real competition from BNSF. As a result of the monopoly, there was no real rush to make things better. Also the Port of Oakland isn’t as busy as LA/Long Beach in terms of container ships.
I disagree with the premise that we can’t know ANYTHING about the motivations.
In case you haven’t noticed this forum is populated by a number of very smart people with all sorts of historical and active connections to the railroads.
I asked on this forum, because I was confident that I could get a first approximation answer on this from people either familiar with the players and event or people with knowledge of the routes themselves.
Sure, the executives themselves aren’t here, but we can get a lot more detailed information I think. Or at least I hope I can.