I would suggest that UP is and has been negotiating "hard ball" terms and conditions for certain improvements and uses of its ROW and/or trackage.

There have been a series of high level meetings recently, all the way up to the Secretary of Transporation, with the most senior RR executives in the nation on ARRA, IC, Amtrak, HSR, and significant funding for ports, borders, major terminals. I think we are now seeing a number of these types of moves that are linked to this "dialogue" and a change in "responsiveness" on both sides.

I think that we are going to see a series of small compromises, and some important national regional decisions to get things going, and continue "confidence building". We see this on things like Colton Crossing. Which might be regarded as a measures of trust building with the RR's that true projects of national and regional economic significance would get priority, even though a lot of locals squawked about it. I think that you may also be seeing this in UP's go ahead with the Illinois high speed and capacity projects, which are also of potentionl significant potential benefit to UP long term, as well. UP is working on a number of other important grade sep projects like the San Gabriel trench project, that also is designed to facilitate the increased Sunset capacity needs of UP. So something like this, to relieve up stream and down stream choke points, in exchange for more access, doesn't sound that far feteched.

UP has prioritized the Sunset for its own limited capital out west, but it is looking out a few years to more traffic growth over Donner, and especially on the Roseville Sacramento segment. They are rational corporations attempting to maximize stockholder performance, if shared use is to some degree a reality, then the RR's want investments and conditions that don't interfere with that performance. It's a corporation, it doesn't care who pays, as long as it gets paid, for its assets and services. I wouldn't take too much of what local UP officials say in public, as the UP's public negotiating strategy, as where they might finally end up when they get what they want.