Rotary lunch on Tuesday was meatballs, pasta in alfredo sauce, broccoli, chicken, and perhaps a revolution. You never really know what to expect. The program, ostensibly, was a couple of train nerds (it takes one to know one) from Salt Lake. Christian Lenhart and Cameron Blakely have a fascinating proposal to move the railroad back to the historic Rio Grande train station. The Frontrunner train, a passenger service that runs from Ogden to Provo, now has its main Salt Lake station in the middle of the switchyards blocks west of the historic depot. The fact that I can’t really put a finger on the exact location, or figure out how to drive there, sort of explains all that is wrong with it.
It’s an “intermodal center” which means all forms of inconvenient and unused transportation options converge there at 3rd South and 6th West, in a building that looks like an abandoned Studebaker dealership (I Googled it). But if you are willing to wait long enough, you can catch the Frontrunner train to Ogden or Provo, Amtrack to Denver, and maybe meet up with a Greyhound Bus from Winnemucca. Cue the “Midnight Cowboy” music. And people wonder why it doesn’t work as the front door to Salt Lake.
Their plan is to bury the tracks under 5th West, where they used to run on the surface, and use the historic Rio Grande depot building as the passenger depot. It worked for 50 years or so. It makes sense because it actually is downtown and not in a bunch of kind of scary warehouses. By moving the tracks and sinking them, 40 acres of land can suddenly be redeveloped into housing and other downtown stuff. Think Hudson Yards in New York: They buried 28 acres of active rail yards in the middle of the city, with luxury offices and apartments on top. It’s apparently the only part of the New York real estate market that is still booming.
The Rio Grande proposal is truly grass roots. The guys presenting it aren’t working for anybody. They just got focused on it in their spare time and have become obsessed — a “will re-engineer rail service/plan neighborhood redevelopment for food” sort of thing. In their broadest version, there is a rail line that goes west to Tooele, and a line that goes east to Park City. The potential for a Park City line caught the attention of local rail nerd Bill Ciraco who has also done a thorough, and entirely volunteer, analysis of routes connecting from Parleys Canyon and I-80 into Park City, with connections to Richardson Flat and a gondola to Park City Mountain.
There are, of course, a million reasons why it will be difficult and maybe impossible. There are also a million reasons why the whole thing deserves funding for a more thorough study The alternatives are further widening of S.R.-224, the inevitable widening (again) of I-80, and so on.
Truly obsessed, Bill had assembled a guest list that is remarkable because it is the first time many of them have been in the same room. There were representatives from Wasatch County, Summit County, Heber City, and Hideout. Planning commissioners from Park City and Summit County were there, as well as a Park City assistant city manager. I don’t know if the Park City’s elected officials were doing battle with the pickleball mafia, the Legislature, or were afraid of catching inter-jurisdictional cooties, but they were conspicuously absent despite Park City’s centrality to the plan. It was the kind of meeting that the city would have spent half a million dollars on a consultant to put together. It happened for free, and it included lunch.
Sparks are funny things. Sometimes they are just a spark and that’s the end of it. Other times they start something smoldering that smokes a while before fizzling out. And sometimes, a spark blows things to smithereens. I have no idea where the spark ignited on Tuesday will go, and even as a planning geek and rail nerd, I’m not completely sure how much of it makes sense. It’s a very preliminary look at a very complicated idea. It ignores jurisdictions, state agencies, and fiefdoms. In other words, it’s a hell of a good start. There are buckets of federal infrastructure money looking for someplace to spill, and this is as good a place as any.
What really stood out was that the whole discussion was initiated by a couple of guys from Salt Lake trying to improve the Rio Grande neighborhood (just because) and a Park City guy looking for a traffic solution that might actually work. Using the Rotary platform, they were able to get all the bickering jurisdictions in one room to hear a grand plan. I’m not sure they had all been in the same place at the same time ever before. But there they were. No shots were fired. Introductions were made. Minds were opened. Cookies were eaten. Maybe a year from now nobody will remember it, or maybe, as Olympic planning gears up, the idea of re-establishing rail service between Park City and Salt Lake will get some traction.
As an exercise in civics and how self-governance is supposed to work, it was an amazing thing to have watched.