i am curious about the 122 mile long towner railroad which operates 122 miles of ex MP track from NA junction near pueblo, colorado to Towner colorado on colorado/kansas border. is this shortline still in business, or is it being torn up for scrap. heard that V&S Railway owned it and then heard state of colorado owned the railroad. can anyone help me sort out which is correct info?
You may already know this, but V&S railway filed for abandoment of the line in August of this year 2015)
Docket No. AB 603 (Sub-No. 4X)
(1) The thing is in limbo. The abandonment filing is void.
(2) There are two offers for assistance out there…
(3) The rail pickup train is gone.
(4) A&K (V&S) is about to collide with STB. A&K tried a procedural end around the last time and it blew up in their face. Two separate sets of attorneys plus CDOT made a fundamental blunder that nobody, except the surveyors (PLSC) caught. PLSC also hammered them on the Federal Grant R/W issue that they tried to sweep under the rug.
(5) A&K owns the railroad, but they failed to notify STB or anyone else until recently (another A&K junkman’s careless blunder)
(6) A&K is going to have to explain why it ignores state statute in two separate cases. They are already in the state’s crosshairs for two other screw-ups that date back to the 1990’s. Their biggest enemy is looking back at them in the mirror.
Chutton: Your entry above is missing something very key, very simple. Look at state map and see if you can find it. Hint: look at a USGS quad for Todd Point, Colorado.
Stay tuned.
Ok, so the STB filing is void - probably my search term string was lacking, but that was the latest info I could find with simple searching (lots of info from 2000 or so discussing how spiffy the new operators were going to be).
As for the Todd Point, CO - USGS map - this is what I could find - not sure what the hint means.
BTW, the turn of the century articles indicated the freight traffic expected was pretty much grain and quarry, with a rail museum eventually. What were/are the real revenue prospects for this line?
Looks to me like our college MC has found that Otero County is involved for a very short distance which ‘probably’ voids the abandonment application because of the inaccurate description.
(1) As for the map, lower right hand corner, it’s there in bold black letters (it isn’t in Hutton’s cut & paste attachment above…DC got it.)…Looks kinda dumb when you don’t even know whatcha bought?
(2) white winter wheat (the drought is finally over), relatively high grade (for filtering) limestone deposits, oil & gas (read fracking) carload bulk materials plus some E-W bridge traffic. Car storage has helped a little, but it kills operations (A&K already stripped the backtracks and sidings where they could get away with it - a couple of the Ag industries didn’t catch on until it was too late. Typical less than above board or ethical A&K stealth tactic.)
Between Fower and Boone there is a junction - which line is that coming in from the southeast? It looks like there were 2 roadbeds west of there? Can anyone give a little history of those lines?
Thank you.
Mr. Chicken, I know n
I doubt MC would be willing to post that here. If you do a search on “a&k railroad colorado problems” you’ll find a few links that might give you an idea of what’s going on. Hint: at least one link included the word “vultures.”
From what I have seen, these people are vultures; vultures (the bird kind) look for dead or almost dead animals and if the animal is not quite dead will attack it so as to hasten its death.
May they be absolutely foiled in this instance.
Between Fowler & Boone …The junction is NA Junction (North Avondale Junction or NepestA, heard both as explanations of the name) and it was, until 1974, the crossing of the MoP and the ATSF. The two railroads ran as a braided pair the rest of the way into Pueblo. The MoP was the latecomer by about 13-14 years in 1888. The Towner line is the old MoP. After 1974, there has been a single track joint line built out of pieces of both railroads. When the line consolidation happened, there was no clue that the Powder River coal boom was about to happen. By the 1960’s, both railroads realized they had excess plant there.
EDIT: For the record, ATSF built into Pueblo from the east in February 1876…MoPac built into Pueblo in December 1887 and was officially in operation on 1/1/1888…There was almost a third railroad in the 26 mile stretch between Pueblo and NA Junction in 1906 [Headed to Burlington on the Rock Island out on the KS border], the Colorado & NorthEastern RR, but American Sugar Refining (later American Crystal Sugar) backed off in its war with Holly Sugar over the sugar refining and supply capacities in SE Colorado. Union Pacific’s Kansas Pacific/ “Arkansas Valley Ry” (which I assume DC is expert on, being from the SE CO area) was coming from the other direction (Kit Carson-Las Animas-La Junta-Timpas Creek/Swink) in 1875 until it fizzled out in 1877…Coulda been a congested place.
MC, Nepesta (NA) is what some old timers used, and I may have known some of them. Now I are one!!
My understanding is that A&K and their dealings gives vultures a good name in comparison.
Thank you.
Someplace in Trains way back when was a itttle story or photo caption like “Incident at Nepesta Curve” - might have been the FM publicity photo series, or a frontispiece-type photo and caption.
Bingo !
“Incident at Nepesta curve - a slow order not canceled”
by Robbins, Ralph M., from Trains, September 1969, pg. 43.
(keywords: anecdote atsf speed )
- Paul Nortth.
I don’t want to get into a debate about A&K (sometimes considered the “Darth Vader” of the short line industry). But I was pretty heavily involved in the Towner Line abandonment and ultimate line sale in the 1990’s, so let me make a few observations.
The Towner line used to be part of a main line of the MP between Pueblo, Kansas City and points east. It was also the major eastern connection of the DRG&W (at Pueblo). Because of the importance of the Pueblo conection to DRG&W, the latter road got trackage rights over the Pueblo-KC line in the UP-MP merger. Once DRG&W and SP became part of the same family (following the abortive ATSF-SP merger), the “new” SP used the DRG&W trackage rights east of Pueblo (including rights over the Towner line) to cobble together a “central corridor” transcontinental route (including the Tennessee Pass line west of Pueblo) which had higher costs and poorer service than any of the competing transcontinental routes - not a winning combination.
UP proposed to abandon the Towner line as part of the UP-SP merger. The combined UP-SP system would obviously have superior routes to handle the transcontinental traffic SP had been handling over the line, and the on-line traffic was miniscule. The STB approved the abandonment as part of the UP-SP merger (Docket No. AB-3, Sub-No-130).
At this point the story gets interesting. The various communities served by the Towner line sought to preserve the line. From my perspective, their motivation seemed to have more to do with preserving real estate tax revenue than preserving rail service. Be that as it may, the state ended up purchasing the line from UP for Net Liquidation Value (the scrap/sale value of the line’s assets less disposition costs), on the theory that, if the line proved to be non-viable (as it proved to be), the state could recover the value it had paid.&n
Two abandonments ? Not giving you a hard time here - far from it - but just wondering if that actually happened (pertains to the Adorirondack Railroad situation thread elsewhere on this Forum).
- Paul North.
Who operated the Tower line when Colorado owned it? Did Colorado put conditions on the sale of the line? Was A&K the only bidder?
And this was the route of the Colorado Eagle, which I rode in 1960 in a through sleeper from Wichita that ran on an MP mixed train to Herendon (?) where it was attached to the streamliner. Rode it to Colorado Springs, or rather to the Palmer Lake just north, since the porter failed to awailen me in time. Fortunate for me, the towerman was going off duty and drove me back to the Springs.
Dave, your connection was at Herrington, KS
I too have ridden the Colorado Eagle, but only between Pueblo and Denver several times.