Few places between Chicago and the West Coast have much rail transit. Starting when most streetcar and interurban lines disappeared, rail was essentially forgotten as a means for providing urban mobility. A few cities added trains and light rail lines at the end of the past century and the beginning of this one: Dallas and Fort Worth, Houston, and Salt Lake City. Austin, El Paso, Phoenix, Kansas City and Tucson each have a line, St. Louis and Oklahoma City have a bit more, and Albuquerque has a railroad with limited service. With all that progress, only one city in that part of the West has built a large-scale rail network. That’s Colorado’s capital, the “Mile-High City” of Denver.
Storied Streetcar
The Rocky Mountains are part of the Denver area’s heritage. Today’s passengers can feel that on a trip west of the city on Amtrak’s California Zephyr. The Old West is also part of the city’s heritage. You can see its influence in the State Capitol with its gold dome, the D&F Tower and other classic buildings on Sixteenth Street (an auto-free street that was built to host streetcars, but sadly, features shuttle buses instead), and the Buckhorn Exchange, a classic Western restaurant that opened in 1893, and served Buffalo Bill Cody in its early days and heads of state at a summit conference in 1997.
Denver’s streetcars from another era had a sort of “Old West” flavor, too, including some of the labor strife that characterized Colorado’s past. In a post on his blog at www.53studio.com, cartographer and transit historian Jake Berman recounted the Great Streetcar Strike of 1920 and how “a three-way battle between the Denver Tramway, the Denver city government, and the streetcar workers’ union ultimately culminated in the declaration of martial law.” Things eventually calmed down, and the streetcars kept running until 1950. Denver Tramway, the historic (and unpopular for at least some of its history) streetcar operator kept going as a bus operator until the Regional Transportation District (RTD) took over in 1969. Rail transit did not return to the city until a quarter-century later. The first light rail line came in 1994, followed in 2006 by local trains serving the classic 1914-vintage Union Station that anchors the similarly historic Lower Downtown (LODO) neighborhood.
Monumental Rail Transit Hub
For the first 21 years after streetcar service ended, Denver still had trains on several railroads that served the classic Union Station. As happened everywhere else in the U.S. and Canada, the trains came off and, by the time Amtrak began its operations in 1971, the only Amtrak trains serving the city were the San Francisco Zephyr between Chicago and the City by the Bay, running three times per week on the Union Pacific’s Overland Route (later the route of the Pioneer), and the Denver Zephyr, which continued to run daily from Chicago, but no further west.
Service on the middle part of the classic California Zephyr route continued as the Denver & Rio Grande Western’s Rio Grande Zephyr, a day train that ran on a tri-weekly schedule to Salt Lake City and did not connect with the train from Chicago. It was the last long-distance passenger train in the country that was still run by a private-sector railroad. I rode it in 1982, and it was magnificent, with an eight-car consist that included four dome cars and featured Rocky Mountain Trout for dinner in the dining car.
That incarnation lasted until 1983, when Amtrak took over the operation. For a decade, Union Station hosted only Amtrak’s version of the California Zephyr, but different trains eventually came. Today, except for the Zephyr and a seasonal ski train to Winter Park and Fraser, all the trains run locally under RTD auspices.
New Rail System in Town
For almost the next two decades, Union Station was a lonely place, except for about two hours each day, when Amtrak Train 5 or 6 came through. The Great Hall no longer hosted the activity of the prior Golden Age of Rail Travel, although a small gift shop soldiered on, along with a counter that served as a good place to grab morning coffee while Train 5 was standing in the station.
In 1994, better times began for mobility in the Denver area generally. The RTD, which had been a bus-only agency for decades, opened its first light rail line on Oct. 17, 1994. Planning for light rail started about a decade earlier, following the lead of San Diego and other cities, mostly on the West Coast. The original 5.3-mile line, the Central Corridor (part of today’s D and L lines), ran between stations at I-25 and Broadway on one end, and 30th and Downing streets on the other. Siemens SD-100 LRVs made up the original fleet.
The LRT was extended over the following 23 years. The 8.7-mile Southwest Corridor to Littleton (the rest of today’s D line) came in 2000, followed by the 1.8-mile Central Platte Spur into Union Station in 2002 (on the E and W lines today). The 19-mile Southeast Corridor (extending the E line along I-25) came in 2006, along with a branch along I-225 in a northeasterly direction. The West Rail Line (W-Line) to Golden opened in 2013, and R Line, running east of the city, mostly on a north-south alignment, opened in 2017.
Then some cuts came. The C and F lines were suspended during the COVID-19 pandemic and discontinued officially in 2023. Those routes combined parts of other lines that are still running, so no areas lost their service completely.
New Trains, New Look
The LRT serves the area south of Union Station, and primarily on the east side of the city and nearby towns, except for the W Line that runs west. Another rail system—not LRT—now serves areas north of the station, and it brings a bit of the flavor of Eastern railroading to this unabashedly Western city. The equipment is the same as SEPTA’s Silverliner V railcars: electric multiple-units (EMUs) built by Hyundai-Rotem. They run on the only electrified regional rail lines (as opposed to metropolitan transit) west of Chicago, except for the newly electrified Caltrain line between San Francisco and San José.
There are currently four routes serving Union Station. The first and longest, the A Line (East Rail Line), opened for service on April 22, 2016. It stretches 23.5 miles to Denver International Airport, partially on a UP right-of-way. It runs high-density service: every 15 minutes during the day and every 30 minutes in the evening, spanning 21-1/2 hours per day and running 30 minutes later on Friday and Saturday nights. The B Line (Northwest Line, however far it eventually goes) opened three months later, but it is only a 6.2-mile stub to South Westminster, with no intermediate stops. The original plan called for the line to run for 41 miles and terminate at Longmont. It would also serve Boulder, the home of the University of Colorado. Service runs hourly, as a point-to-point operation. The G Line (Gold Line) goes through the historic town of Arvada on an old Colorado & Southern line and runs on a half-hourly schedule. It is 11.2 miles long and opened in 2019. Similarly, the N Line (North Metro Rail Line) runs on a half-hourly schedule to Eastlake. It opened for service in September 2020, about six months after the COVID-19 virus struck.
FasTracks Progress
FasTracks is an ambitious multi-modal plan for expanding transit in the region, and it includes regional rail and light rail, as well as constructing new busways. The voters approved tax increases to pay for the program in 2004. Its first completed project was the W Line (West Line) light rail to Golden. Other projects in the program included all four regional rail lines serving Union Station and extensions of the E, F, L, and R LRT lines, as well as several bus projects.
In addition to federal money and sales tax revenue, the program receives private contributions, and efforts have been ongoing to encourage Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) in communities along the lines. Redevelopment at Union Station was a major project, too, as the building has changed dramatically. Instead of railroad offices, the historic building now houses the Crawford Hotel, with guest rooms upstairs. Rather than serving as a conventional hotel lobby, the Great Hall has been turned into a lounge, with seating and facilities open to the public. Amtrak maintains a ticket office and other functions needed for Trains 5 and 6, and there are also a few food operations there: a restaurant and bar, coffee shop, breakfast-only restaurant, ice cream store and sandwich shop.
Union Station is more than the Great Hall, platforms and tracks, though. Before it became a hotel, there was controversy about its design, and the issue has not died down completely. Only seven years after light rail service came to Union Station, the redevelopment plan proposed by the Union Station Authority planned to move the light rail station a quarter mile away and put a bus terminal in between. The Colorado Passenger Rail Association (ColoRail), the state’s passenger rail advocacy organization, sued in federal court to challenge the redevelopment plan over that issue. Charley Able of the Lakewood Edge, a suburban community paper, reported on May 20, 2009, that plans called for the light rail lines to be isolated from the historic station, and that ColoRail had asked the judge to set aside the plan as “arbitrary and capricious” on the grounds that citizen input was not considered sufficiently, and that the design could preclude future expansion of service to other lines. Those included the proposal for a Front Range Rail corridor (to Fort Collins and Cheyenne, Wyo., to the north and Colorado Springs and Pueblo to the south). A later proposal for the Rocky Mountain Flyer, a train between El Paso and Montana, would face the same problem: the station’s current stub-end design.
Between the old and new light rail locations is a new 22-bay bus terminal, also part of the “Union Station” complex. On May 11, 2014, the new light rail station opened for service. I happened to be in Denver that day, and asked then-Mayor Michael Hancock if he was sure that the entire FasTracks program would be completed. He answered with a single word: “Definitely!”
Despite the mayor’s enthusiasm, his prediction might be less likely to happen now than it had seemed back then. Beyond the recent and general anxiety about how many rail lines and transit projects the feds will be willing to fund in the POTUS 47 Administration, FasTracks is not yet completed. Despite everything that has been done so far, there are still two LRT extensions that have not been built. They are an extension of the Central (L Line) from 30th and Downing streets to a connection with the airport line (A Line) at 38th and Blake with two new intermediate stops, and a one-stop extension of the D Line south from Littleton. There was also a proposal to run service on the Northwest Rail Line (past Westminster) through Boulder to Longmont with three trips during peak commuting hours in the prevailing direction only, but it ended up in the hole for lack of funds. The final report for the Northwest Rail Peak Service Feasibility Study, released on Sept. 20, 2024, said that a full-service schedule would require “significant infrastructure, including a second track through the entire Northwest Rail corridor.” So, with the likely exception of the two short projects mentioned earlier, FasTracks might be coming to the end of the line, at least for the foreseeable future.
RTD spokesperson Pauline Haberman told Railway Age: “Aside from the feasibility study regarding RTD’s Northwest Rail corridor, the agency has not planned expansionary projects. The largest capital project in 2025 involves continuing light rail reconstruction efforts to maintain a state of good repair for existing infrastructure following 30 years of usage.”
Because of that, there appears to be no means in sight to build and operate a conventional rail line all the way to Boulder, despite the college town’s potential as a strong ridership center. An express bus route is not a rail line, and even Denver’s transit leaders expected it would take decades before everything in the program would be completed.
According to ColoRail, the problem is lack of money: “The cost is currently estimated at more than $1 billion, money that RTD does not have and will not have until perhaps as late as 2050. The public, and ColoRail, still want the promise of Northwest Rail fulfilled. RTD’s Board set up a savings account to put aside money toward Northwest Rail. As of early 2024, it had a $183 million balance.”
On April 10, 2015, Cathy Proctor interviewed outgoing RTD head Phil Washington, a highly respected transit manager, as he left RTD to take the top job at L.A. Metro. She reported that Washington had projected 2044 as a completion date for FasTracks, which is not much sooner than ColoRail predicts. Washington stated that expectation only one year after Mayor Hancock’s expression of enthusiasm, which means that even he doesn’t see FasTracks completed until 19 years from now.
Nonetheless, Denver has a credible rail transit network that serves a city and surrounding region where there was no rail transit until 1994. It might not rival the network that resulted in the resurgence of downtown Los Angeles, but it’s still an impressive success story for rail transit.
