WASHINGTON — The Surface Transportation Board has turned down a request to reconsider its approval of construction of Utah’s Savage Tooele Railroad.
In a decision issued today (March 3, 2025), the board’s four members agreed that those who had petitioned for reconsideration — the Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment, Erda Community Association, and two individuals — “have not provided the Board with anything that would mandate a different result” and “merely repeat arguments already submitted during the environmental review.”
The Savage Tooele matter first came to the board in June 2022, when the company sought permission to build an 11-mile line, including part of a former Union Pacific branch, to connect the Lakeview Business Park in Grantsville, Utah, to UP’s main line. After the STB’s Office of Environmental Analysis issued an assessment calling for 62 environmental conditions to the project in March 2024, a board decision on April 1, 2024, allowed the project to move forward [see “STB approves proposal …,” Trains News Wire, April 2, 2024].
The petition seeking reconsideration was filed April 22, 2024, and asked that the project be stayed, but that request was rejected because the stay request was not filed in a timely fashion. Work on the railroad began in November 2024 [see “Groundbreaking held …,” News Wire, Nov. 8, 2024], but
Today’s decision is the first to address one of the six long-running cases that STB Chairman Patrick Fuchs recently said the board was working to resolve [see “STB updates efforts …,” News Wire, Feb. 21, 2025]. Fuchs, appointed as board chair by President Donald Trump on Jan. 21, has said one of his goals is to have the agency address matters more quickly.
That’s a bunch of Democrat red tape. Those who oppose the project did not file their partition accurately and Biden and Trump told the service Transportation board to reject that partition. Savage is going to build those rails were there before the condos so they have the right to build in that industrial park.
Imagine where the industry would be had railroads required anything other than a charter when the first ones were constructed?