BRADY, Texas — Rail customers in Brady, a town of 5,300 some 128 miles northwest of Austin, Texas, are in limbo after the Texas Central & Colorado River Railway embargoed its route and announced its intention to discontinue service.
Shortline owner OmniTRAX informed customers in Brady of the embargo July 25, and confirmed the move in an email. According to OmniTRAX Chief Commercial Officer Peter Touesnard, “The railroad was embargoed for safety reasons after our engineering team was dispatched to the line for repeated issues with sun kinks. They have identified 15 sun kinks along the 67.5-mile line as well as other track and bridge defects.”
The deteriorating nature of the railroad’s physicaI plant led an official in San Saba, Texas, to issue a code violation notice for unsanitary/unsightly conditions along the railroad’s right of way.
OmniTRAX took over the former Heart of Texas Railroad, between Lometa, Texas, and Brady in 2016 [See “OmniTrax buys Heart of Texas,” Trains News Wire, May 11, 2016]. The railroad’s primary business has been transporting frac sand from Brady, but two area firms — Pioneer Natural Resources Co. in Brady and Covia Corp, with two mines in nearby Voca — announced plans to close their mines in November 2018, in favor of sand from West Texas mines closer to well sites. In a 2018 San Angelo Standard-Times newspaper article, Brady Mayor Anthony Grover estimated the closure of the Pioneer Sands facility alone would cost the city 350 jobs and $310,000 in lost revenue.
The railroad says frac sand traffic is now nonexistent; the only sand being shipped is used for glass production. Therefore, Touesnard says, “We have no time frame currently to return the line to normal service given the overall financial condition of the operation. Separately, we are also applying to the Surface Transportation Board to abandon/discontinue service on the line due to lack of traffic.”
A prior operator, Gulf, Colorado & San Saba, declared bankrupcty in 2012, and the Heart of Texas was shut down for a year after a 2013 fire that destroyed the railroad’s trestle spanning the Colorado River near Lometa. Finding an operator the replace the Gulf, Colorado & San Saba was possible because of the booming frac sand business, but the exit of that business removed more than half of the railroad’s traffic.
Finding a new owner/operator for Brady’s only connection to the national rail network — the short line’s interchange with BNSF Railway in Lometa — is likely to be a challenge. In similar circumstances, government agencies have often purchased a shortline to ensure rail access remains. Whether local agencies have discussed this scenario is unknown — the city of Brady did not immediately respond to an e-mail inquiry — as is the city’s financial ability to undertake such a purchase.
The loss of the sand business could have been lessened by a rock quarry that was slated to start production in 2017 and was expected to produce more than 5,000 cars annually. However, local opposition killed that project.
It’s a good thing those NIMBY’s chased all those good paying jobs off! You gotta have minimum wage jobs with pretty trees in the parking lot to make them happy and loads of cheap garbage from china.
Makes me think of the almost demise of the rail line to Churchill, another OmniTrax operation.
More illustrations of the coming new dark age. Sounds like the “local opposition” is fine with committing suicide in order to avoid “environmental damage”.
“The loss of the sand business could have been lessened by a rock quarry that was slated to start production in 2017 and was expected to produce more than 5,000 cars annually. However, local opposition killed that project.”
Once again, the NIMBYs (or maybe BANANAs) kill local business and rail service. They should be very pleased with themselves.
I’m trying to figure out what “unsanitary/unsightly conditions” means. That’s a strange way of saying that it worn out.
And it hasn’t been that long since an article in either TRAINS or Railfan mentioned the railroad (prior operator) was thinking about rebuilding west of San Saba!