...with 40 seconds to spare

For my 50th Birthday, Patti got me a nice train ride from Denver to San Francisco on the California Zephyr.  (More about that here)

Seven years and a few months later, it's our 30th wedding anniversary.  We need to go on a nice trip.

Where should we go?

Alaska?  Hawaii?  Bermuda?

All great ideas!

But, for a variety of reasons...oh, okay... Because of time and money constraints, we decided to go to Colorado.  A few days in Rocky Mountain National Park and a couple of days in Vail (it WAS our anniversary, after all.)

The whole trip was fantastic, but that's not what I want to talk about here.  What I want to tell is how I just happened to plan the route between RMNP and Vail to go through Beyer's Canyon on US 40 so that I might sneak in a little railfanning.  There were a few alternate routes between the two places, but none were appreciably faster or more scenic, so I had plausible deniability on my side.

I figured an hour's delay to stop and wait for a train to appear was not too much to ask. I floated my plan to Patti and she thought it was a fine idea....oh, okay...  She said it was okay with here, as long as her iPad was charged up and we didn't get to Vail too late in the day.  "All set!" I thought.

I had done some preliminary scouting using "Streetview" in Google Maps.  The road was on the south side of the Canyon and it looked like there were lots of places to pull off to the side of the road in the canyon. So, getting a nicely lit scene seemed possible. This was good. I had also taken a look a the Amtrak timetable and had seen that the California Zephyrs both went through the canyon in the afternoon - the most likely time we would be there.  Also, good.  The afternoon weather in Colorado in the mountains in the summer is sunny. Also, good...Oh, okay...  Sunny with many quixotic thunderstorms - something about hot air rising into cold air over mountains.  In Georgia, we have the hot air part, but no mountains with cold air, but we have lots of thunderstorms just the same.  Why?  I have no idea.  I was hoping for sun, but expecting rain.

We drove into the canyon about 2:15 PM and I started scouting a good spot.  Usually, this is when the train appears and I'm in the wrong spot, with the camera on the wrong setting, and I step out into traffic, or in an ant hill, or off the side of the road and down an embankment, or the sun goes behind a storm cloud.  But, not this time!  I found a really good spot for a westbound.  And, atypical for the weather that time of day, it was actually becoming more sunny as time went on!

Patti and I agreed that 3:15 was the cutoff.  No train by then, then off we go.  C'mon train!

I camped out in my spot and waited.

Here I am waiting..

If I lean a bit to the right, I can get the Colorado River in the scene.

The trouble with Beyer's Canyon is two-fold. One is the line of sight is very short.  The train could be on top of you before you caught a glimpse.  That might not be a problem if you could hear it coming, but that was the second problem.  The highway noise on US 40 drowns out everything as even a car passing by makes a racket that echos off the hard canyon walls.  There was hardly a moment when it was quiet.  I had to make sure my camera didn't go to "sleep" while I waited.  I'd never get it turned back on in time once the train popped out around the curve.

Still, the spot was really nice and the sunlight was improving as time wore on.  15 minutes went by.  Then 30 minutes.  I started getting bored.  I took pictures of the wildflowers nearby.  Colorado is full of wildflowers.

I have no idea what kind of flower this is.

...nor this one

Then, we were up to 45 minutes gone. I was starting to get worried about getting skunked.  I took a picture of the location as if the train was there.  For some reason, this is what I do when I get skunked.  I have lots of train pictures without trains in them.

I decided to check my smart phone's Amtrak app to see when the Zephyrs might come by. No data service.  I checked a few more times, moving the phone around a bit.  Still, zero bars.

While I had the phone out, I took a panorama shot of my location.  Here it is.

I'm a big fan of my Samsung GS3.  This is one reason why.

Now, we were up to 55 minutes gone.  Still no train.  When we rode the California Zephyr in 2006, there were lots of trains on the route.  In fact, just about every passing siding was full of coal.  Where were all the trains?  Maybe those sidings were full because the UP network was backed up elsewhere?  Maybe the coal traffic dried up with the recession? Who knows?  I just knew I'd been there almost an hour and no train.

57 minutes.  58 minutes.  59 minutes! Nuts. Should I call it quits?  What's one more minute?  I'll stick it out for that last minute.  Besides, the sun was out almost fully - the best it had been since I got there.

Twenty seconds later, I hear some commotion behind me.  It's Patti yelling, "It's the Rio Grande heritage unit!"...oh, okay... she actually yelled, "A train is coming!"  I spin around.  Sure enough, the eastbound Zephyr. I was hoping for a westbound, but c'est la vie!

Much to my surprise, Patti has her little Canon "point and shoot" camera out.  She aims it at the train and starts shooting.  Gets a couple pretty decent shots.  Not bad for a first-timer!  She later admits, "I had no idea what I was doing.  I just kept taking pictures!"

Patti's first shot

Her second shot.

In the hour I was waiting, In my boredom, I did frame up a few shots for an eastbound.  Sun angle wasn't great, but it wasn't horrible, either.

Here's what I got.

Rolling by some cool looking weathered rock spires.  I remember these from when I was on the "inside" in 2006

Back to back P42s along the Colorado

A "going away" shot.  I would have preferred a westbound, but I'll take this one!

Forty seconds to go.

I was worth the wait!  On to Vail - with a smile on my face!

P.S. For the record, Patti had gotten out of the car to tell me we should wait another ten minutes, when the train showed up.  I married the right person!

Never send a pipeline to do a train's job

Got this email from my local Rep. saying "Thousands of potential jobs sit on the sidelines and we continue to rely on oil from the Middle East" because we haven't approved construction of the Keystone XL pipeline.

Baloney, I say.  Keystone XL pipeline?  Bah!  Who needs it?

There has been much braying and trumpeting going on in good old Washington DC lately about how, when and if the Keystone XL Pipeline gets built.

If you listen to the trumpeting, you'd think all of western civilization hangs in the balance.  If we could just build this pipeline, unemployment would be solved and then all that Canadian and North Dakotan oil would flow downhill to our refineries and we could tell the Middle Eastern oil producers what they can do with their oil! (Sell it to China and India, perhaps?  That's where it's going now, anyway.  Most of our oil comes from our hemisphere.  Only 13% comes from the middle east.  Check it out! where does our oil come from?)

If you listen to the braying, you'd think we (and our food animals) would be all eating, not only genetically modified corn, but well lubricated corn, as well - that all of Nebraska would become just one big oil puddle if the thing sprung a leak. (example here: The pipeline is the root of all evil)

But, from both of them you get the idea that no pipeline = no oil.

So, I'll let you in on a secret.  We don't need the Keystone XL pipeline.  

I'm not talking about solar or wind or biomass or natural gas or coal or even conservation.

I'm talking about a way to get all that oil to where it needs to go without building a pipeline from anywhere to anywhere - RIGHT NOW!

Trains are moving the oil.

Well, you say, "how much oil? Trains can't possibly move as much oil as a pipeline."

Well, you would be wrong.  Trains can move ALL the oil.

Here are some facts.

The Keystone XL pipeline is designed to handle 830,000 barrels a day.  That sounds like a lot, until you find out that one single train can carry 89,000 barrels of oil. (for the detail oriented:  A barrel is 42 gallons.  A tank car can hold 30,000 gallons.  A train can have 125 cars.  Do the math!)  So, the Keystone pipeline can be replaced by nine trains a day.  Is that a lot?  Not really.

Consider that railroads run 100 coal trains a day out of the Powder River in Wyoming.  50 years ago, that number was near zero.  The track and equipment to reach that total was put in place in a span of a decade or two.  So, can railroads rise to the challenge of moving crude oil.  Certainly, they've proven  more than that in recent past history with coal.

This coal train is on the last 50 miles of it's 1700 mile trip.  One of approximately 100 coal trains a day to operate out of the Power River Basin in Wyoming.

In fact, they've already proven it this year.  Right now, railroad are carrying more than 800,000 barrels of oil a day to east coast refineries - a longer haul than the planned 1200 mile pipeline.

Here's another fact to consider - the value of the oil in transit.

The 3 foot diameter pipeline holds ~ 1.25 barrels per linear foot.  In order to get 830,000 barrels a day out of the end, the goo has to flow at 5 mph.  Oil trains can average about 20 mph terminal to terminal, so trains only tie up 1/4 of the inventory that would be tied up in transit in a pipeline.  How much is that inventory worth?  At 20 mph for 1200 miles, it would take about 23, 125 car train sets to handle 830k barrels per day.  At $100 a barrel, that's $2B in oil on the move.  For the pipeline, it would be four times that - $8B!  That's a lot of money to have laying around doing nothing!

So, if RRs can do it all and do it faster, why all the interest in the pipeline?

Cost.

It's not about national security or jobs or stifled energy production.  None of that.

It's just transportation cost.

Pumping the goo through a three foot pipe at 5 mph uses quite a bit less energy than a train of tank cars moving 40-50 mph.  Energy isn't cheap.  Also, every train needs a fresh, two man crew every couple hundred miles.  Not so for the pipeline.  The difference might be a few cents per gallon in price at the pump for us.

Also, to some extent, safety.  Railroads run though the middle of towns because those towns grew up along the rail lines when it was the only way to get around.  An oil train derailment in a town could be a mess.  A new oil pipeline can avoid towns.  Even though railroads have a generally excellent safety record, pipelines are a bit safer, inherently.

Sum these up and the balance tilts toward the pipeline by a nose.

...as long as you have a lot of product,

...going from A to B,

...for a long time.

That someone is willing to build it for profit tells me the economics are likely there.  So, the way being clear, let them.

But, is the pipeline the "ultimate answer to life the universe and everything"?  No. (42 is the answer) We could live without it.

Easily.  So why all the fuss?

But, our friends in Washington need something to do. Trumpeters and brayers, how about this? www.fixthedebt.org/‎