Federal court derails proposed Utah oil railroad
Fears, concerns and legal challenges over a proposed oil train route along the Colorado River were finally addressed in federal court last week. Until then, plans for the Uinta Basin Railway project, which would ferry vast amounts of crude oil from northeast Utah eastward alongside the Colorado River, sailed through federal agencies tasked with approving large transportation projects. But then the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., successfully challenged the project’s environmental impact assessments, siding with the railway’s opponents and striking a blow against what would have been the largest petroleum corridor in the United States.