More than a half century after the last passenger disembarked Car No. 10 of the Yampa Valley Mail train, an effort to revive passenger rail from Colorado’s capital city to the state’s northwest corner is taking shape.
The type of train hasn’t been chosen, ridership projections haven’t been publicized, fares haven’t been set and travel times haven’t been announced. But the first leg of Colorado Mountain Rail — which eventually would connect Denver to Craig — could carry its first passengers in as little as two years.
The biggest battle to making the 231-mile-long service a reality is already won, says Paul DesRocher, director of the Division of Transit and Rail at the Colorado Department of Transportation.
“The tracks are there,” he said of the corridor Union Pacific Railroad has used for years to transport freight across the state. “Many of the stations are there, and we have a good partnership with Union Pacific. It’s logical for us to capitalize on the built environment that’s there and reinitiate passenger rail service.”
But one of the big questions still outstanding — the cost to launch and operate the line and from where that funding will come — has not yet been answered by CDOT.
“We really need to sharpen our pencils on that,” DesRocher said.
The project got a big boost last week when the state announced a set of agreements with Union Pacific, which owns the tracks. The framework includes renewing a lease allowing the railroad to traverse the state-owned Moffat Tunnel — a century-old, 6.2-mile bore under the Continental Divide between Rollinsville and Winter Park.
The new lease, which will run for the next 25 years, is conditioned upon Union Pacific providing access to its tracks for passenger trains running the Colorado Mountain Rail corridor. There are still many details to be worked out, but a final execution of the contract is expected by May.
The revival of a passenger train from Denver to Craig — passing through Winter Park, Granby, Kremmling, Steamboat Springs, Hayden and other towns — is part of a renewed focus on developing passenger rail in Colorado. It began nearly a decade ago with an effort to establish Front Range train service between Fort Collins and Pueblo, an effort still in the planning stages.
Project proponents say Colorado Mountain Rail will take hundreds of vehicles off dangerous high-mountain passes and narrow rural roads every day. The service also will provide crucial commuter transport for workers in western Colorado communities — from Craig to Steamboat to Oak Creek — that are undergoing a convulsive transition from a coal-based economy.
“This is a project that would support the workforce in my district,” said state Rep. Meghan Lukens, a Democrat who represents Routt, Moffatt and Eagle counties at the state legislature. “It would be a way for workers in my district to safely travel between these towns. People up here are excited and optimistic.”
But closer to Denver, enthusiasm for the project was more muted among the 60 or so attendees at a CDOT-led community meeting in Arvada in mid-December. Anna Smith, a resident of Arvada’s Candelas neighborhood, was worried about the impacts of a proposed train station near her home.
“I’m concerned with the amount of traffic and noise and how it’s going to affect us,” she said after sitting through CDOT’s presentation at Storyline Church. “I wouldn’t use (the train) because I have a car.”
John Marvin, who has lived in Arvada for 55 years, said Indiana Street is already a traffic nightmare. Luring people from Golden, Boulder and beyond to pick up the train in Arvada for a day on the slopes in Winter Park or Steamboat, he said, could make travel that much more difficult for locals.
“It’s a beautiful ride — I just don’t think it’s practical,” Marvin said of the bucolic journey through Colorado’s northern mountains. “It’s for skiing.”
Arvada Mayor Lauren Simpson says she understands the reservations among some residents in the city’s northwest corner, which has been transformed over the last decade from prairie to a sea of rooftops. But the project could also be a boon for a sleepy section of the city, she said, injecting vitality and business opportunities into a rail corridor mostly relegated to freight trains (except for the seasonal Winter Park Express ski train).
For Arvada workers, Simpson said, Colorado Mountain Rail could also serve as a commuter line to Denver that would be far easier to access than the Regional Transportation District’s G-Line station on Ward Road.
Coal’s decline, new opportunities
The resurrection of passenger rail service between the Front Range and northwest Colorado 56 years after the Yampa Valley Mail train came to a halt in 1968 is due in large part to the recent travails of the coal industry.
Where coal was king in Colorado in the 1970s, the industry has famously fallen on hard times. The world has shifted to cleaner forms of energy in response to worries about climate change caused by the burning of carbon-based fuels. The massive coal-fired power plants in Craig and Hayden, once the lifeblood of northwest Colorado’s economy, are planned for closure in just a few years.
Union Pacific’s trains, which have moved coal for decades, have become fewer and fewer as the industry has waned.
“Union Pacific approached the state to see if the state wanted to operate a passenger rail service in this corridor,” CDOT’s DesRocher said.
Part of the route is already used by Amtrak’s California Zephyr, a passenger train that travels between Chicago and San Francisco with a stop at Union Station in Denver. Mike Jaixen, a Union Pacific spokesman, said the company is “open to working with CDOT on the project.”
But the rail company has no intention of ending its freight business on the route.
“The most successful passenger services work closely with their host railroads to invest in safety infrastructure, create reasonable schedules and be willing to adjust to changing conditions,” Jaixen told The Denver Post.
Those logistics — how to feasibly share a largely single-track corridor — will have to be worked out with Union Pacific over the next few years, DesRocher said. And then there’s the price of access.
“It’s their railroad,” DesRocher said. “Just like when you rent a house — you have to negotiate a rental fee.”
Last week’s agreement with the railroad included a waiver of access fees, though the state would have to pay a proportionate share of operating and maintenance costs to use the tracks, as well as carry the cost of any needed upgrades.
State Sen. Dylan Roberts, a Democrat whose district includes the section of track from Craig to the Continental Divide, wants to accommodate people and cargo. On the passenger side, Roberts thinks the new service could be a critical transport link for workers priced out of the Steamboat Springs housing market, where the median home price is $1.2 million.
“The fact of the matter is housing is more affordable in Hayden and Craig,” he said. “I see passenger rail as key to Craig’s and Hayden’s economic transformation.”
But he also wants to boost freight traffic in the corridor, recognizing that goods moving in and out of the Yampa Valley will help keep the economy there humming. In the last regular legislative session, Roberts co-authored Senate Bill 190, which extends tax credits to companies that bring freight into “coal transition communities.”
It was signed into law in May.
To be built in three phases
Many of the details about Colorado Mountain Rail that people want to know — fares, costs, travel times or whether trains will be equipped with Wi-Fi — won’t be released by CDOT until early 2025.
What’s known is that Colorado Mountain Rail will be able to tap a $200 million pot of money created by a pair of bills passed by the state legislature in 2024. One, Senate Bill 184, imposes a $3 fee on car rentals to help fund “multimodal transportation options,” including rail projects. The other, Senate Bill 230, levies a production fee on oil and gas operators that will help pay for passenger rail efforts.
Money would need to be spent on rebuilding at least a half-dozen stations at stops west of Granby, all of which have been disassembled or fallen into disrepair since the days of the Yampa Valley Mail. Improvements would also need to be made to tracks and equipment along the corridor.
“The railroad was built in the early 1900s — they were chopping out walls with pickaxes,” DesRocher said.
There potentially is also money available from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law passed by Congress in 2021 and signed by President Joe Biden. There have been some questions about whether the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump might try to halt some of that funding, but Roberts doesn’t think it will come to that.
CDOT plans to tackle Colorado Mountain Rail in three phases. The first would expand on Amtrak’s Winter Park Express service, which runs only around weekends during the ski season, to a daily schedule. Depending on the service plan the agency selects, CDOT could send up to three daily round-trip runs between Union Station and Granby.
The agency hopes to have that leg of service operating by late 2026 or early 2027.
The second phase would involve establishing the commuter trips at the western end of the line, between Craig and Oak Creek — with the potential for up to three round-trip voyages a day. The final phase would be the full ride from Denver to Craig.
Neither the second nor third phase has been assigned a date certain for their debuts.
Due to the challenging topography en route and infrastructure that was built a century ago, CDOT is not promising bullet train-like service with Colorado Mountain Rail. Back when it was the Yampa Valley Mail, the train took 6.5 hours to make the journey one way.
CDOT has not determined how long Colorado Mountain Rail will take to make the 200-mile-plus run. Via CDOT’s Bustang Outrider bus service, the trip takes five hours. Driving it by car takes less than four hours.
“Stars have aligned”
For those who question whether there is a market for travel between the Front Range and Craig by train, CDOT points to its Outrider bus route as proof there is. The Denver to Craig bus is the second most popular of nine Outrider routes in the state, behind only the bus to Crested Butte.
It carried just over 11,000 passengers this year through November, according to CDOT data.
DesRocher said many people would rather read, sleep or scroll their phones while on long trips “instead of white-knuckling it” behind the wheel.
As far as an Arvada station goes, DesRocher said no site has yet been picked. It’s possible, he told the gathering at Storyline Church, that it won’t even be within the city limits.
Roberts, the state senator, recognizes that the dynamics surrounding passenger rail are far different in metro Denver than they are in Steamboat Springs, Kremmling or Hayden. But on balance, there are just too many positives in favor of reviving the service, he said.
“The stars have aligned for passenger rail,” Roberts said.
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