There was a window of time when the Donner Pass line was REALLY underutilized. It was after UP had absorbed WP and SP had not yet struck up its alliance with Anshutz and D&RGW.

UP didn't have any incentive to hand off traffic to SP at Ogden --- not when they had their own line to the Bay Area in the form of the WP.

SP wasn't interchanging all that much with D&RGW. SP essentially had a "780-mile branch line to Utah," as one employee at Sparks, NV described to it to me at the time.

I can kinda see where Moyers reasoned that Donner Pass could use some "plant rationalization" and no one would notice. At that point in time, they probably could have ripped out a lot more track over Donner and there wouldn't have been any "pinch points" as far as capacity was concerned.

Sad but true.