The Rio Grande Plan: Salt Lake City

A historic train station sits near the heart of Salt Lake City, but many riders still get dropped on the edge of downtown and told to transfer and walk through empty industrial blocks. That disconnect is at the center of our conversation with civil engineer Christian Linhart, one of the voices behind the Rio Grande Plan, a citizen-led proposal to rework how trains move through downtown and how the city welcomes people arriving by rail.

We dig into the plan’s three big moves: build a grade-separated rail corridor through downtown (supporters argue railroad crossings and fast trains do not belong in a major city center), bring service back to the Rio Grande Depot as the main downtown train station, and clear space for redevelopment by removing rail yards that currently wall off the west side. Along the way we talk about why the current setup struggles for comfort and dignity, how freight trains can snarl intersections, and how fixing the rail network could also help address Salt Lake City’s long-running East-West divide.

If you care about Salt Lake City transit, downtown redevelopment, commuter rail, or better station access, listen through to the end and get involved. Subscribe, share this with a friend who rides trains, and leave a review with your biggest question about the Rio Grande Depot and the future of rail downtown.

Transcript

Why The Plan Matters Now

SPEAKER_02 0:52

Salt Lake City's plan to rethink its downtown Rio Grande depot has been picking up steam the last few years. We've covered it on the show in the past, but in just the last few weeks, we've been disappointed to see that these plans might be in jeopardy. So today we're talking with Christian Linhart, a civil engineer who is one of the authors of the Rio Gran to get us up to speed on what exactly is happening in Salt Lake City. So thank you, Christian, for being here. Very excited to chat with you today. To start, can you just kind of help get folks up to speed on what exactly the Rio Gran is, the kind of the higher level vision of what the plan is?

What Riders Face Today

SPEAKER_01 1:31

So the Rio Grande Plan has about three, well, just three steps. The first is to create a great separated corridor for trains through downtown Salt Lake City. We currently have about 70 trains that go through downtown every day. Most of those are commuter trains, but a lot of them are the big freight trains run by Union Pacific, the two-mile-long freight trains that snarl up intersections for a long time. And the commuter trains, they go really fast, but they also go faster than some people expect. There's been fatalities every year that we've been uh working on the Rio Gran Plan. Uh it's it's it's an ongoing issue that really shouldn't be a problem for a major downtown area. Railroad crossings don't belong there. So the first step would be to create a great separated corridor through downtown. Uh, we believe that the best place for this corridor is along the street called 500 West, which would put it right next to the old train station, the Rio Grande. So the second part is to restore the Rio Grande as Salt Lake City's major uh main train station downtown. And then the third part of that would be to take the space where the train tracks currently are, all the rail yards on the west side of downtown, uh, and remove those railroad tracks so that you can use that land for development. And we've calculated that the developments that you can uh build in that area would return more money to the city and to the state, uh, a lot more money than it actually costs to build the real grand plan. So it becomes a self-financing plan in the long run.

SPEAKER_02 2:56

Yeah, and I I think that piece of it is so important. So when Chris and I were in Salt Lake City a couple years ago now, uh we took the front runner into uh you'll have to correct me if I'm getting the name wrong. I think it's Salt Lake Central Station. And when we were there, we couldn't help but feel Yeah, I was gonna say when we were there, we couldn't help but feel like it didn't feel so central. Uh it was kind of a just uh I mean it was also a very cold winter day. It felt very, I don't know, some empty industrial land nearby and not much going on. Uh and we actually were just walking, we to be totally honest with you, we had no idea about the Rio Gran Plan when we first showed up. And we were walking towards downtown Salt Lake from the Central Station, and we saw the Rio Grande Depot there, and we were just like, holy crap, like this looks beautiful. Like, why was the train station like why did we get off where we did? Um, and then you know, like that night literally found Rio Gran Plan and all this sort of stuff. And you know, we were like on my kicking ourselves that we hadn't known about it before because we may have reached out to you even ahead of time back then. But um, so this is kind of restoring the rail line back to where it used to be. Can you talk a little bit about the importance of this? You touched on it a little bit here with like the freight trains, you know, going through downtown, but can you give some kind of uh real-world context of of what that means for folks who are kind of traveling in this area every day?

SPEAKER_01 4:22

Aaron Powell Well, sure. Yeah, your experience isn't uh unique. Many, many people have decided to let's try the train to get to downtown. And they find that instead of getting into downtown directly on the train, it takes them far out on the outskirts of town and leaves them, you know, close to the freeway with a location that doesn't have any kind of shelter, any kind of amenities, and basically no respect for the riders that take public transit. Uh we're trying to attract people who uh uh travel in cars, you know, the very comfortable environment in their own personal cars. And uh we're asking them to go to this spot, uh this place that really has no comforts, uh, and then transfer to another vehicle, another train, another bus to get the rest of the way to downtown. It takes more time. It's it's just uh not a good system. And it didn't used to be that way. Like you said, the Rio Grandepot is right there. It's only a block and a half, or you know, because it's Salt Lake City in the huge blocks that's a quarter mile away. Uh but you can see it from the street. Uh and it does block your path to get to downtown. If you're trying to get to downtown from Central Station, you need to go to the old train station and walk all the way around it, which again, big blocks means that you're traveling another quarter or half a mile out of your way. Um the the the train station used to be in operation up until 1999. It was our main Amtrak station. Uh, but unfortunately, the way that the town or the city was laid out with the tracks in the middle of the street, um uh that that had to be reconfigured uh ahead of the 20 uh the 2002 Winter Olympics. So the big freeway project that rebuilt the freeways near downtown, uh removed those railroad tracks and pushed all the tracks to the far west side of downtown. Uh and you know that that was important for the time, but you know, after the Olympics, we we got our commuter rail system, frontrunner, the 50 passenger trains every day. And it's become one of the busiest uh commuter rail lines in the country, uh at least at least in terms of you know population that it serves. And and so there's been a real resurgence since then. And we're trying to build a real uh railroad station resurgence as well to go with the service.

The Depot Transfer Surprise

SPEAKER_02 6:26

I guess fast forward to today now and in the last couple of weeks, I think I saw via your your social media for the Rio Gran Plan. Uh we'll make sure there's links for folks to uh you guys post quite a bit, and uh, we're always kind of keeping up to date on what's happening for folks to go follow. But uh that there the the plan is at risk right now. Uh there is a potential sale of the building happening. Uh it sounds like it wasn't entirely a straightforward thing. It was kind of like hidden within a bill to some degree. Can you kind of explain for folks and for me uh what the details of this current situation is?

SPEAKER_01 7:02

Aaron Powell Well, uh a few developments have happened over the weekend. But what's essentially happened is that uh our citizen group of volunteers who is promoting the Rio Grande Plan, we looked at the most recent uh legislation that's gone through uh the legislative session for uh you know Utah 2026. And in the funding bill, House Bill 2, there was an undefined provision. And our sleuths uh found the uh supporting documents and found that that specific provision that's undefined in the bill is meant to uh transfer ownership of the Rio Grande Depot, the train station, uh, from the governor's office, which had been, you know, the State Historical Society had owned that, and they'll give ownership to the University of Utah uh for uses um that the university will define later on. And uh that was quite a surprise to us uh because this provision had been snuck in on the very last day of the session and it was undefined. Uh we were very worried someone was trying to sneak something past us that would block uh the future of the Rio Grande It turns out that I mean it it's not a good way to uh have a transparent government, but it turns out that the governor's office um uh wasn't specifically thinking of the Rio Gran when they were making this uh sale or this uh transfer of ownership. Uh they view it as a temporary thing. Uh they actually had run out of money uh that they were using to uh restore the Rio Grande Depot. There had been a big earthquake in 2020, and the building was severely damaged. Thankfully, the state has a good insurance policy for the depot, so it was getting fixed, and in fact, structurally, it's it's fine now. It's been completely fixed. The depot's ready to go for another hundred years longer. Uh it's it's in very good shape structurally. But the inside of it, uh the historic uh plaster, the molding, the finishes, uh, that wasn't done. Uh it's uh pretty much just a bare warehouse inside the old train station now, and they don't have the money to finish it. So they said rather than have the building sit empty for a couple years while we get the funding in place, let's let someone else use it. And the university stepped up and said, we would like to use that space, and so they're going to get access. So we had asked specifically for a line item veto of that provision. Uh the governor did not do that over the weekend. He signed the bill, so the um ownership is going to be moved to the University of Utah. Um so that's a done deal. But because we raised this issue.

SPEAKER_02 9:34

So it sounds like it's oh yeah, go ahead. Yeah, go ahead. I was gonna say, but it sounds sounds a little bit more positive than what I had initially heard about it. So it sounds like hopefully some good news coming.

SPEAKER_01 9:44

Right. So so we've been in full panic mode, right? Because none no one had told us about the transfer of ownership, and we had assumed the worst, that it was one of the enemies that we've made on the in the state legislature trying to uh put a permanent uh uh close to the Rio Grant plan. It turns out uh, you know, never assume malice when um I guess lack of communication can fully explain what's going on. So the governor, if they'd only just reached out to us and said that this is something that we view as temporary, um, but then we may not have uh panicked so much. But our group, we sent out calls for people to contact the governor's office to contact the city, and they hadn't been expecting a lot of feedback. Um uh they were very surprised by the amount of feedback they got. They had been expecting that they could do this without a lot of public scrutiny, uh hence the undefined uh provision of the bill. Uh but instead we found it, we called them out, we got every major news organization to uh pressure them for answers, what's going on? The governor had to make a statement during a regular press conference, which is something he had not been expecting to do. And uh a lot of people on Capitol Hill were very impressed by the amount of uh public engagement this caused. And so they uh people who had been dismissing the Rio Grande Plan as something that was not um feasible uh politically, they understand now that there's a lot more uh legislative allies uh in favor of the plan than they expected. Um I mean it's not a completely happy story uh either. Uh sorry, uh I I I don't want to paint this as like a finished issue like that the for sure the temporary, because I mean we've been told temporary before. Uh the station that you know as Salt Lake Central Station was originally meant to be a temporary Amtrak station uh while they figured out how to get back to the Rio Grande Depot. Back that was back in 1999. Um and as you can see, obviously it's become you know more permanent now. Uh and so we're hoping it's not going to be something like that. But uh again, uh we don't see this as the end of the Rio Grande Plan. We see this as maybe you know two steps forward and one step back.

SPEAKER_02 11:51

Right. And I mean, uh looking at this from afar, I mean, there's there's a couple potential positives you could pull out of this. Number one, everyone just saw the the organizing power that you all have put together, and that like, whoa, if we go against this plan, we're gonna hear about it and we're gonna hear about it loudly and quickly. Uh so I think that does two things. One, it uh helps put momentum behind politicians to come out in support of the Rio Grande Plan and knowing that, like, hey, if I go out on a limb and support this, I'm gonna have all of these people kind of backing me in my elections or whatever it may be. Um and it also makes it hard for people to oppose it, too. So uh on the political side, I think you potentially score some wins. And then correct me if I'm wrong here, but uh if if done correctly, it feels like if they are indeed trying to essentially fundraise to redo the inside of the building, maybe this you know, temporary, and well, you know, hopefully it is temporary, uh transfer to the university um could help help along the kind of restoration process in terms of the finances of it.

How Citizen Advocacy Builds Power

SPEAKER_01 12:59

That's right. It could be a very good thing in the in the long run. In the short term, again, we're still concerned how temporary is it? And then of course, because it's owned by the university, it's not going to be open to the public. We've been hoping that, you know, uh if they had stuck to their schedule that, you know, next year it would be open again as a place that we could take people and show them we have a train station, why don't we use it? But in the meantime, we still have to just show them the outside uh and uh say, imagine if this were open as a train station. So it it yeah, it's dragging things out, it's adding steps, but on the other hand, it's it's not the fatal blow that some of our critics were hoping it would be.

SPEAKER_02 13:38

Right. No, and uh that's definitely interesting to kind of get the latest update there. So uh something that's really unique about the Rio Gran Plan to me at least is that uh this was entirely a citizen-led initiative, uh at least at the start. I mean, it's not like any of you all who are uh kind of in the the team who are really running the show at the Rio Gran Plan were politicians. You weren't in, you know, no one was the mayor or like a city council person or something, but you were, you know, I know you're a civil engineer, but this just seems like it was a a group of folks who had an idea, pitched the idea, and then uh slowly have been kind of building this political support. Uh at this stage, like what is the uh feedback that you receive from some of those people in positions of political power in terms of their levels of support and like what they need to do to help kind of get this across the finish line?

SPEAKER_01 14:34

Yeah, it's it's been a real uh education for all of us uh working on the Rio Gran Plan because we were uh yeah, none of us uh who uh started the Rio Grande Plan ruling were uh politicians at the time. You know, I'm a civil engineer, uh other people were into marketing or uh other community engagement efforts. Um uh some were advocates just for you know more social uh equality because the east and west sides of the city are divided by those railroad tracks, and so anything that could be done to uh better that uh was interesting to them. We had this idea for the Rio Grande and then the issue became how do we get the government to be interested in it? Uh we started with Salt Lake City, we moved on to the county, and then eventually we're working with the legislature now. Uh, but we found that this is a very different way than most projects end up happening. Uh, this is kind of backwards uh to the way that things usually work. Usually the government is tasked with finding a problem, once it defines the problem, then it comes up with its own solutions, and then it works from there. But the Rio Grande Plan was a solution uh to a problem that the citizens all knew about. The railroad crossings, the train station there, like it was obvious to us. But because there isn't one specific agency that's tasked with uh redevelopment and public transit and social divides like the East-West divide, uh none of the single organizations was willing to take this on. Uh, what we found is that this really needs leadership from uh the legislature or elected representative to say that this is the problem that the people see we need to solve this um you know politically. Uh thankfully, politicians turned out not to be as difficult to reach and talk with as we were expecting. You can set up an appointment with them pretty easily. Um you have to meet with them an awful lot though, in order for them to see that you're persistent. Um, so it's taken us uh four or five years working with some of the different politicians to uh actually build up our legitimacy as a serious organization, and um it's always helpful to have the public contact them too. You know, one person coming to your office is um an enthusiast, maybe a crazy person. But if the public is also sending in postcards or emails or phone calls saying, please do this thing, the real grand plan, and especially if it's their colleagues saying, What do you think about this, the real grand plan? Well, suddenly that adds an extra layer of legitimacy. So it really feels like you're maybe spending years spinning your wheels doing nothing, just talking. But talking is the most important part about building legitimacy in political circles. So that's what we've been working on for a very long time. And we're finally starting to see the that sort of thing pay off with, say, the governor's office now.

SPEAKER_02 17:18

Right, no, for sure. And uh Utah to from from afar seems like it's in a pretty unique situation, too, where support for some of these public transit investments is fairly bipartisan. Um I we don't see that in uh everywhere in the country, unfortunately. Um, and I uh it's it's encouraging for the most part to see it there. And like correct me if I'm wrong on that, but uh from from looking from afar, it seems like there is some bipartisan support for the front runner and and expanding the track system and that sort of thing. Um so it's it is a positive thing to see there.

Bipartisan Transit Reality In Utah

SPEAKER_01 17:52

I I'm torn on this. So I like to think Utah is unique. I live here, I love it. Uh it's a great place to call home. Uh and there's many good things that are unique about it that it's attractive. But on the other hand, um, I'd like to think that any other uh state or or group that's you know as constrained as we are, with uh traffic being on just a single interstate, you know, all the cities in one row up and down the Wasatch uh mountain range, uh, you know, we have such big traffic issues. I I'd like to think that anyone who had traffic like we do and uh the opportunity that we do with uh a single commuter rail line able to handle this thing, I'd like to think that we'd all be able to be as as uh uh functional uh and and able to work together uh bipartisan to make this work. Um uh sorry, I lost my train of thought there.

SPEAKER_02 18:40

Okay Yeah, it just I I guess uh our I can try to think of a way to rephrase the question for you. Like, is is what I what I am seeing from afar that there that that this is uh there is bipartisan support for public transit in Utah? Like, is that is that reality? Is that just like a handful of folks? Uh I'm just curious.

SPEAKER_01 19:04

Oh no, there definitely is bipartisan support. Um being a civil engineer, I've been privileged to go to a few conferences about how UDOT, the freeway group, is uh looking at their future. If it if if everything, uh all the growth projections are correct, uh they're saying that we would need to add a second layer on top of our freeway, you know, double deck it. So you have a northbound on the ground level and then a completely separate, you know, 10-lane freeway going north uh to handle the amount of expected traffic. And uh people are rightfully saying that's that's not the best way forward. Uh really the even the the highway department sees that uh the commuter rail line and and public transit and uh bike lanes, uh even intercity rail, those have to be part of the planning for the future because there is just not a way to make uh uh highways work as the only transportation mode. And so a big emphasis in uh uh the uh upcoming plans for uh transportation ahead of the Olympics is something called the Front Runner 2X project. It's where there'll be you know uh more frequent commuter trains, hopefully they'll be make them go at least as fast as they do now. Uh they're going to get more rolling stock, uh more trains, and this is going to cost, you know, it's gonna be a several billion dollar project all on its own. Uh but uh it's one of the things that the Department of Transportation is very uh focused on promoting, saying, here's what we're doing to improve traffic, and it's a train. I think that's very encouraging.

Next Steps And How To Help

SPEAKER_02 20:33

Yeah, I wish uh I wish I'm not in Texas anymore right now, but uh when Chris and I started the show, we were both living there, Chris is there, and we we wish that Textdot in Texas would would try to solve traffic with trains as well. But unfortunately, we we consistently get the just one more lane solution. Um and mysteriously it does not always uh seem to solve the problem. But um, so uh you take take your wins there where you where you can get them, which is which is good to see. But um, I guess uh uh what would the next steps need to be to help make this a reality? Now, like there's a lot of jurisdictions involved here. It's not just like only the state makes a decision or only the county or only the city, for from what I understand. Uh, what are the the next steps to happen so that we can hopefully see the Rio Gran Plan become a reality?

SPEAKER_01 21:21

The next step is already going to happen. Uh the WeConnect study is an ongoing study from Salt Lake City uh using some federal transportation dollars to study how infrastructure improvements can uh resolve the East West divide in the city. And we think that the Rio Gran Plan has a very good shot at being one of the preferred choices of solving that East-West divide. So that would mean that about the time this time next year, or maybe a little earlier, uh, February-March timeframe, uh, the city will produce its uh or sorry, release its results to the public of uh what its intentions are going forward. And if we are able to make sure that the Rio Grande Plan is one of the city's preferred modes, uh we hope that we have a lot of the dominoes lined up already at the county, at the state, uh with the governor's office, and even our federal delegation to say, okay, Salt Lake City is decidedly in support of this. Uh let's let's support them in their decision. Uh a lot of this will come down to uh the legislature if they're willing to work well with Salt Lake City. There's been uh a lot of history of the Republican legislature and the Democratic city not working well together. Uh so we're trying to smooth those uh differences at the moment. Uh and public support, uh, you know, letters. Phone calls, postcards, anything that we can do to send into our legislature to let them know that this is a statewide issue, not just a Salt Lake City issue, that would be extremely helpful.

SPEAKER_02 22:44

No, absolutely. So I guess where can folks learn more about the Real Grand Plan, support you guys, all of that sort of stuff, uh, if folks are interested.

SPEAKER_01 22:54

Uh we have a website, uh Real Grand Plan Salt Lake City.org. Uh we have a link tree with uh many different social media channels for news and updates, uh, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, they're all there. Uh uh, just visit our website, uh Real Grand Plan Salt Lakesity.org, and please let your elected representatives know that you support Real Grand Plan.

SPEAKER_00 23:18

Public transit wherever's at watch me go.