Union Pacific this week notified workers it will shutter its Burnham Shop repair yard in central Denver, putting more than 200 jobs on the line and darkening a piece of Colorado history.
Operations at Burnham will halt Feb. 14, the Omaha-based railroad said.
“The well-documented decline in the coal carloadings in Colorado — a result of natural gas prices and regulatory pressure — has diminished the need for locomotive repairs and overhauls in the Denver area,” Calli B. Hite, a Union Pacific spokeswoman, said in an e-mail to The Denver Post.
Loaded coal trains originating in Colorado have decreased 80 percent since 2005, Hite wrote.
The maintenance, repairs and overhauls of locomotives will shift to Union Pacific sites in North Platte and South Morrill, Neb., and North Little Rock, Ark., Hite said. Union Pacific has 16 mechanical shops with 50 employees or more across its 23-state operating system.
Union Pacific employs 300 people at Burnham and the North Yard Shop, located off West 48th Avenue. About 90 workers will be kept on at North Yard, and Hite said many of the remaining 210 employees will be offered the opportunity to transfer to other sites.
Union Pacific is in discussions with the six unions that represent the affected workers.
Under the shop crafts agreement inked on Sept. 25, 1964, employees have the right to follow their work without any loss to them, said Rich Nadeau, of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers District Lodge 19 in Denver.
The agreement guarantees members six to 60 months of work, depending on years of service, Nadeau said.
“We’re going to do everything we can to help our members and our friends get through this as easily as possible,” he said.
The IAM represents 73 of the affected employees, said Nadeau, District Lodge 19’s assistant to the president and directing general chairman.
“I know that Union Pacific has been looking at different options over the years because of the location of that locomotive facility,” he said. “We were not made aware of (the planned closure) until yesterday.”
The decision represents a significant blow to the railroad industry in Colorado, he said. “It’s very disappointing to lose this amount of people at this location.”
Burnham, he said, was the largest railroad work yard in Colorado, and the prospects for finding similar work in the region are “not that good.”
“Burlington Northern has a small facility downtown, just north of Coors Field, which used to be large and they’ve cut that back,” he said.
Hite said the railroad plans to prepare the 70-acre locomotive repair yard, located east of Interstate 25 between West Sixth and West Eighth avenues, for sale. There are about two dozen buildings on the site, which is zoned for industrial uses.
“The 70-acre property is located in an area experiencing renewed urban development,” she wrote.
Although the Burnham Shop dates to the 1870s, when the Denver & Rio Grande railroad began to build south from Denver, neither the site nor its buildings are designated city historic landmarks, said Andrea Burns, a spokeswoman for Denver’s Community Planning and Development office.
Mike B. Davis, a trustee with the Colorado Railroad Museum and a former superintendent of Rio Grande, which eventually was rolled up into the Union Pacific, said the shop was “built not only for rebuilding locomotives, but also for freight and passenger cars.”
Today, the work at Burnham is relegated to locomotives, Union Pacific’s Hite said.
The shutdown didn’t come as a complete surprise, Davis said.
“The railroads have been consolidating shops for a long time,” he said. “But it’s going to be interesting to see what happens to the land.”
Alicia Wallace: 303-954-1939, awallace@denverpost.com or @aliciawallace
