Great job Christian! I've been waiting with anticipation for Part 3. Heres to a Part 4 that years from now will tell the story of a successfully restored Rio Grande Station! One that serves as a part of living history in the form of a reactivated and revitalized Historic Rail Station with a lively city district as it was meant to be and of the how the People all came together to make it a reality. I'm excited to be a part of this movement. Salt Lake City, Utah and the Intermountain West deserves better. We can and must build a better future and The Rio Grande Plan does so all while honoring the past!
Christian, amazing work as always!! I am honored to be working with you on this endeavor. Now if we can get more people to write the Mayor of Salt Lake City and get her on board I think we can get this thing built.
Also, with the massive Gateway complex around it now it would be literally impossible to use that Union depot again. Despite the fact that the Gateway has been losing tenants and bleeding money exponentially since the opening of the City Creek Center. Still, removing all those buildings and reusing that depot is going to be absolutely impossible. I still agree as well that the Rio Grande Depot absolutely is the better choice regardless. The fact that it’s still in an accessible position to be used again is just the icing on the cake here. It would be ironic and poetic for the new incoming Olympics to undo the damage of the 2002 Olympics.
30:59 its worth noting here that a similar thing happened when the UPRR and SP merged, when UP corp bought SP, they merged all of SP's holdings other than SPRR into UPRR, then merged UPRR into SPRR, later renaming the surviving railroad as UPRR. This means that technically today's Union Pacific is the same organization that Southern Pacific was before the merge. (From "Union Pacific Corporation" on wikipedia)
@CSLenhart somewhat? from what i read on wikipedia, SP and D&RGW were still technically separate railroads at the time (much like CSX when it was first formed), and D&RGW was one of the assets merged into UP before it was merged into SP. At the same time you still could say that because the SP structure is the former D&RGW that was renamed, it is the surviving railroad out of the 3
I really like the renders for UTA's HQ building. That will make for a perfect bus station. ;) I think Salt Lake City need both the Rio Grande Depot for trains and UTA's building for quicker highway access by road-based vehicles.
@@CSLenhart i always saw the sign while walking down 13th and wondered how they got the rights to that name and logo, its because they literally used to be in the depot
There's an aspect of these modal split comparisons between the US and e.g. France that could be seen as slightly misleading (in a way). The numbers you quoted are entirely true, and they do tell us clearly that the US transports an incredible amount of freight by rail. But they apply only to inland transport. The geography of the US and Western Europe is fundamentally different: The North American continent spans about two and a half thousand miles from ocean to ocean, with many major agglomerations located far inland. Salt Lake City itself is almost a thousand miles away from the port at LA and Long Beach, which is the perfect condition for running large intermodals. Those containers still have to complete their last mile journey on trucks, and with the large distance between American intermodal terminals, that last mile on a truck can stretch for hours. The US also produces large amounts of raw material far away from its shore, with Wyoming coal being one of the main drivers of rail freight traffic. Just as a thought experiment, one of the quirks of modal split being calculated through weight x distance is that the US rail modal share would be significantly smaller if the railroads transported a lot more coal, but the main source of it would still be the Appalachians. You could also bump up the modal share by a lot by laying a giant rail loop in Nebraska but continuing as usual. Western Europe's weird geography of inlets, gulfs and peninsulas has made it so that most agglomerations there are just a stonetoss away from the nearest port, making inland transport almost synonymous with last mile transport. As such, if a t-shirt gets transported to Brussels, it likely arrives at Antwerp by ship and gets trucked to Brussels. The 40km between those cities are less than many last mile transports in the US. For the transportation of that t-shirt, road transportation made up only the last few km, while shipping, which emits less than diesel freight rail, made up the vast majority of it. But in a statistic about inland freight, this journey would read as being fully on the road. That statistic would be right of course, but if would obscure the fact that most goods in Western Europe spend a much smaller part (both in absolute and in relative terms) of their journey on the road than in the US. In France for example, maritime transport accounted for more about two-thirds of freight transport performance in 2022, followed by road transport with a bit less that a third. That is, again, a quirk of a very unique geography. European inland countries and countries on the East European plain with its vast overland distances face entirely different challenges, which shows in their freight rail modal shares, which in 2017 were about 33% for Austria, 38% for Slovakia and as much as 65% in Lithuania and 76% in Latvia.
Thank you for taking the time to add so many interesting details! Yes, my comment was intentionally glib, but as you have demonstrated, it takes a lot of time to add the needed context for to make such a considered statement. I think it is fascinating how completely opposite the underlying situation is for European and North American rail networks - but that somehow, they both found different ways to be successful.
Great job Christian! I've been waiting with anticipation for Part 3. Heres to a Part 4 that years from now will tell the story of a successfully restored Rio Grande Station! One that serves as a part of living history in the form of a reactivated and revitalized Historic Rail Station with a lively city district as it was meant to be and of the how the People all came together to make it a reality. I'm excited to be a part of this movement. Salt Lake City, Utah and the Intermountain West deserves better. We can and must build a better future and The Rio Grande Plan does so all while honoring the past!
Such a beautiful station deserves to be a station
Christian, amazing work as always!! I am honored to be working with you on this endeavor. Now if we can get more people to write the Mayor of Salt Lake City and get her on board I think we can get this thing built.
Great video as always, I hope the future vision for the Depot becomes reality.
Make the Rio Grande Again!
Also, with the massive Gateway complex around it now it would be literally impossible to use that Union depot again. Despite the fact that the Gateway has been losing tenants and bleeding money exponentially since the opening of the City Creek Center. Still, removing all those buildings and reusing that depot is going to be absolutely impossible. I still agree as well that the Rio Grande Depot absolutely is the better choice regardless. The fact that it’s still in an accessible position to be used again is just the icing on the cake here. It would be ironic and poetic for the new incoming Olympics to undo the damage of the 2002 Olympics.
Outstanding research, editing and production. Great job. Your optimism for rail is contagious and uplifting.
Let's get this done Utah.... Hopefully the Olympics coming can kick start this plan. Such a Majestic Building. It's a No Brainer to me.
Keep fighting the good fight chris, you're making waves here in Utah!
Thank you! I'm going to work this problem until it's finished, no matter how long that takes!
🚞 🙌
30:59 its worth noting here that a similar thing happened when the UPRR and SP merged, when UP corp bought SP, they merged all of SP's holdings other than SPRR into UPRR, then merged UPRR into SPRR, later renaming the surviving railroad as UPRR. This means that technically today's Union Pacific is the same organization that Southern Pacific was before the merge. (From "Union Pacific Corporation" on wikipedia)
@@nebula3lem123...so technically, the Rio Grande lives on!
@CSLenhart somewhat? from what i read on wikipedia, SP and D&RGW were still technically separate railroads at the time (much like CSX when it was first formed), and D&RGW was one of the assets merged into UP before it was merged into SP. At the same time you still could say that because the SP structure is the former D&RGW that was renamed, it is the surviving railroad out of the 3
Rio Grande Plan.
Great video. Though unfortunately timed with the new SLCentral renders coming out in the past few days. But alas what are ya gonna do lol
I really like the renders for UTA's HQ building. That will make for a perfect bus station. ;)
I think Salt Lake City need both the Rio Grande Depot for trains and UTA's building for quicker highway access by road-based vehicles.
26:12 WAIT THE RIO GRANDE CAFE BY THE U IS THE SAME ONE THAT USED TO BE AT THE DEPOT
no way thats insane
@@nebula3lem123 Yep! Some of the artwork in the café were moved from the Rio Grande Depot when the depot closed.
@@CSLenhart i always saw the sign while walking down 13th and wondered how they got the rights to that name and logo, its because they literally used to be in the depot
There's an aspect of these modal split comparisons between the US and e.g. France that could be seen as slightly misleading (in a way). The numbers you quoted are entirely true, and they do tell us clearly that the US transports an incredible amount of freight by rail. But they apply only to inland transport. The geography of the US and Western Europe is fundamentally different: The North American continent spans about two and a half thousand miles from ocean to ocean, with many major agglomerations located far inland. Salt Lake City itself is almost a thousand miles away from the port at LA and Long Beach, which is the perfect condition for running large intermodals. Those containers still have to complete their last mile journey on trucks, and with the large distance between American intermodal terminals, that last mile on a truck can stretch for hours.
The US also produces large amounts of raw material far away from its shore, with Wyoming coal being one of the main drivers of rail freight traffic. Just as a thought experiment, one of the quirks of modal split being calculated through weight x distance is that the US rail modal share would be significantly smaller if the railroads transported a lot more coal, but the main source of it would still be the Appalachians. You could also bump up the modal share by a lot by laying a giant rail loop in Nebraska but continuing as usual.
Western Europe's weird geography of inlets, gulfs and peninsulas has made it so that most agglomerations there are just a stonetoss away from the nearest port, making inland transport almost synonymous with last mile transport. As such, if a t-shirt gets transported to Brussels, it likely arrives at Antwerp by ship and gets trucked to Brussels. The 40km between those cities are less than many last mile transports in the US. For the transportation of that t-shirt, road transportation made up only the last few km, while shipping, which emits less than diesel freight rail, made up the vast majority of it. But in a statistic about inland freight, this journey would read as being fully on the road. That statistic would be right of course, but if would obscure the fact that most goods in Western Europe spend a much smaller part (both in absolute and in relative terms) of their journey on the road than in the US. In France for example, maritime transport accounted for more about two-thirds of freight transport performance in 2022, followed by road transport with a bit less that a third.
That is, again, a quirk of a very unique geography. European inland countries and countries on the East European plain with its vast overland distances face entirely different challenges, which shows in their freight rail modal shares, which in 2017 were about 33% for Austria, 38% for Slovakia and as much as 65% in Lithuania and 76% in Latvia.
Thank you for taking the time to add so many interesting details!
Yes, my comment was intentionally glib, but as you have demonstrated, it takes a lot of time to add the needed context for to make such a considered statement.
I think it is fascinating how completely opposite the underlying situation is for European and North American rail networks - but that somehow, they both found different ways to be successful.