![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Within just a few years, this could be the route traveled daily by as many as five fully-loaded, two-mile-long crude oil trains from the Uinta Basin in eastern Utah. With one final turn, trains leave the mountains behind for good, passing just south of the site of the former Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant and bearing down directly into the heart of Colorado’s largest population center. To accomplish the steep descent, trains complete a looping series of turns at a landmark known as Big Ten Curve, where a line of disused cement-filled rail cars buried to one side of the track serves as a windbreak, placed there in the 1960s after repeated derailments caused by high winds blowing across the foothills. Over the next 10 miles, the railroad drops roughly 1,000 feet in elevation, meaning this section of track approaches a 2% grade, near the practical limit for major freight lines. As trains heading east from the Moffat Tunnel take one last sharp turn along a ridge near Eldorado Canyon State Park in Boulder County, the scenery changes abruptly.Īfter traveling hundreds of miles east through narrow river gorges and rugged alpine forests, the Union Pacific’s Central Corridor through Colorado emerges at last onto a high ridgeline offering dramatic views of the Denver metro area and the vast, empty Eastern Plains stretching out into the distance. ![]()
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