WASHINGTON – Federal regulators have issued a 626-page draft environmental assessment for Savage Tooele Railroad’s proposed 11-mile Utah spur project.
The Surface Transportation Board’s Office of Environmental Analysis will accept public comment on the draft report through Oct. 30.
Savage Tooele proposes connecting the Lakeview Business Park in Grantsville, Utah, with Union Pacific’s Shafter Subdivision at Burmester, Utah. The project would create a new common carrier short line railroad, which requires STB approval.
The project would involve rehabilitating a six-mile segment of a former branch line and building five miles of new railroad to reach the business park that opened in 2020.
The draft environmental report is available online.
Can’t wait for all the Colorado folks in Eagle County to file suit re exerting their supposed right to control everything going on in Utah that might affect them in the smallest way. Who knows, a rail car from this operation may go east and drip a drop of oil on tracks on the Central Corridor and The Eagle County Coalition of Stop Everything in Utah will sue saying that Savage did not consider the environmental impact of all “downstream” environmental issues everywhere in the world!!!
Of course this is sort of tongue in cheek and I hope that nothing of the Colorado suit even approaches the folks in Tooele (Pronounced Too-illa) and they get their little shortline. Course that’s what we in the Uintah Basin thought would happen as well. But then the Salt Lake City, UT environmental cronies got involved with the tree huggers in Eagle County Colorado, who all forgot that their SUV’s run on oil products and now the Uinta Basin Railway has to go back and spend several million more to prove to the government that no minnow or pine bark slug or plant that no one has ever seen or heard of any where in the world will not be bothered by building the railroad which tens of thousands of residents in the Uintah Basin want but hundreds in Colorado don’t want. Go figure….
696 pages of ‘report’ for an 11 mile rail spur. The transcontinental rr would have never been buit.
The EEOC and the EPA would have seen to that….
Let’s hope everything goes perfectly well for Savage Tooele Railroad.
Dr. Güntürk Üstün
WP lives! 🙂
They ought to name it the Savage, Grantsville & Western Pacific. Its not even in Tooele. Somehow “Western Pacific” should be in the name. That wouold be a fitting homage. 🙂