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The O. Zone: A rail study would be great, but local stops would be even better
The Winter Park Ski Train in Fraser with Winter Park ski area in the background (David O. Williams photo).
The Denver Nuggets are like a ski train that just keeps chugging inexorably up a seemingly insurmountable mountain toward a glorious powdery destination that’s akin to basketball nirvana.
Why this painful stretch of a simile the day after the state of Colorado inked an historic 25-year lease deal with Class 1 railroad giant Union Pacific to allow the company’s continued use of the state-owned Moffat Tunnel at Winter Park in exchange for three roundtrip passenger trains a day?
Well, because I’m a huge and longtime Nuggets’ fan, and because Mr. Nugget Aaron Gordon is by far my second most beloved Nugget of all time, eclipsed only by the all-time GOAT Nikola Jokic (sorry Jamal and Pink Panther Alex English … and don’t even talk to me about Carmelo). What Gordon did last night in dispatching the heavily favored Oklahoma City Thunder was what the state is doing in getting bigtime Eagle County property owner UP to the table so effectively.
I was traveling in the UK last month when the Vail Daily ran a story on local efforts to get UP to the table regarding the out-of-service (never abandoned) Tennessee Pass Line through the heart of Eagle County between Dotsero and Pueblo (see map below). Then Golden-based seismic engineer Christof Stork, who’s been thinking and writing about Colorado passenger rail, specifically in the mountains, far longer than I have, added some important context and clarification to that Vail Daily story in an LTE.
Back to London, where we were able to enjoy train service all over the place, granted in one of Europe’s most populous cities, including to and from Heathrow Airport. Colorado is far less populous, and it’s situated in a country that is obsessed with stupidly expensive personal automobile ownership even though the nation was built by trains. Still, had we wanted to, we could have trained it to France, and if it had been winter, we could have taken trains all the way to the ski fields of Italy, France and Austria (I know because I’ve done it and it’s wonderful).
I’ve also very recently ridden ski trains from Denver International Airport to the ski fields of Colorado (less convenient but still wonderful) and on the way to DIA to fly to London last month I experienced a classic example of why spending hundreds of millions on Interstate 70 “improvements” such as the West Vail Pass project are akin to putting lipstick on a pig.
That snowy day, April 18, we received alerts that I-70 was closed at the Eisenhower Tunnel (arguably the last major transportation infrastructure project America has accomplished) so we got off at Frisco, headed through Breck and over Hoosier Pass to 285 because we had time to catch our redeye flight and because I-70 doesn’t really work in any type of weather these days.
Even if we could, should we really be thinking about eight-laning I-70 through fragile mountain ecosystems while we wait for Elon Musk to save us with his self-driving semis? Hell, no.
So let me now offer some context and a few clarifications of my own to the Vail Daily story on the lack of funding for a local passenger rail study for a proposed Glenwood Springs to Leadville rail line. First, if you aren’t clear by now, I despise Donald Trump and what he’s doing to our constitutional republic, and make no mistake, he’s no Amtrak Joe (Biden), who actually got the bipartisan infrastructure bill done that Trump talked about for years and is now trying to undo.
Until Democrats, Independents and deprogrammed Trump Cult Republicans take back the House in 2026 and start trying to unravel the horrific mess Trump is making of our economy and our federal government, there will be no federal rail funding dollars. Trump, who I can say with certainty has never sat his fat ass on passenger train in his life, wants to take us back to V-8 land yachts with tailfins running on unleaded gas while cranking Pavarotti on AM radio.
The state, largely due to spiraling Medicaid costs that are not going down anytime soon and likely will only continue to spike due to the Republican obligation to cut taxes for billionaires, has a huge budget hole and will therefore not be offering up any study dollars either. Duh.
But what’s critical here is there is a local rail steering committee now with local elected officials and staff members occasionally meeting with private rail officials and the state to at least express interest in studying the line, and they are backed by the statewide Western Rail Coalition.
Increasingly, it’s beginning to dawn on people that the 30-year-old rails-to-trails proposal for the Tennessee Pass Line (TPL) is not happening – just like tickle-down economics, the rebirth of the middle class and other leftover vestiges of Reaganism in the 80s and 90s. Union Pacific would risk losing the TPL to some very interested competitors if it moved to abandon again.
Also, oil trains won’t be heading over the steeper grades of the TPL any time soon because there’s a ton of capacity on the Moffat Line through the tunnel and even north on the Overland Route through Wyoming on less-steep and therefore cheaper grades to navigate. Not to mention oil production in Utah is likely to plummet as prices crater due to Trump’s global tariff war.
With those two fallacies dispensed of, let’s take a look at what actually happened with the signing by Colorado Gov. Jared Polis of the Moffat Tunnel lease deal with UP. The state gets three roundtrip passenger trains a day on the line that travels between Denver and Grand Junction, following the Colorado River through Eagle County. But, importantly, those six trains a day (three in either direction) will head north to Steamboat at Bond.
The first phase is an extension of Amtrak’s popular Winter Park Express Ski Train to Granby. Then they will expand service on through Bond in northern Eagle County to Steamboat Springs. Finally, the trains will continue on to Hayden and Craig, bedroom communities for Steamboat.
Those three roundtrip trains – big, heavy and diesel-powered – will be in addition to Amtrak’s daily California Zephyr between Chicago and the Bay Area of California, which heads southwest at Bond in northern Eagle County and takes what’s known as the “Dotsero Cutoff” to, you guessed it, Dotsero in western Eagle County, then heads west through Glenwood Canyon.
The deal also doesn’t include the high-end, seasonal Rocky Mountaineer between Denver and Moab that’s run by a Vancouver, Canada-based company. Rocky Mountaineer and Amtrak both pay UP substantial fees to use the company’s tracks through the Moffat Tunnel between Denver and GJ. So the waiver of that fee is what the state gets for letting UP use its 6.2-mile tunnel. The exact value is unclear but let’s assume it winds up being far more than the previous 99-year deal.
Currently, neither the California Zephyr nor the Rocky Mountaineer stop locally in either Bond or Dotsero. The Eagle County rail steering committee, which hopefully one of these days will be absorbed into CORE Transit, should be working hard to rectify that oversight with three more passenger trains per day rolling through our neck of the woods.
Why in God’s name wouldn’t we want a local rail connection? I, for one, would definitely leave my car at a park-and-ride in Dotsero or Bond and take a train to either Denver or GJ given how often I-70 is shut down for hours at a time in both directions. Buses are great, but they are also subject to highway closures, and it’s my understanding CORE Transit is maxing out on what it can do with buses given staffing and road constraints in our limited, linear Eagle River Valley.
The Vail Daily story also failed to mention the parties that attended the steering committee meeting with the state re funding a study. Polis policy czar Lisa Kaufmann delivered the bad funding news for the state, but also there and all ears was Rio Grande Pacific – a short line rail company out of Texas that runs a commuter line there and holds a lease with UP for the TPL.
Could RGP be in the mix to run one or more of the “Mountain Rail” passenger lines between Denver and Craig? Could Rocky Mountaineer be in the mix? My understanding is UP and Amtrak don’t really get along too well. Regardless, our local steering committee having a seat at that table is vital, because it means we’ll have a say in local stops and maybe a TPL revival.
As Christof Stork rightly points out, very different trains could one day run on the TPL. Cleaner, quieter DMU’s (diesel multiple unit) trains like the ones they use in Europe – trains that could someday be electrified or converted to hydrogen – could run on the TPL because there is no competing, heavy freight.
Such trains could connect to our growing Eagle County Regional (EGE) airport directly to the Avon Transit Center and the Riverfront Express Gondola to Beaver Creek. But Dotsero is the key, because it has an existing, active rail line connecting to the TPL, and because it has lots of room for dense housing that’s walkable from a train station.
Eagle County’s rail steering committee should not only be pushing for a study on the TPL, but also advocating for local stops for current and future passenger trains and a daily “Colorado Zephyr” between Grand Junction and Denver. At the very least it should keep state and private rail officials at the table to openly discuss the future of the most important private real estate in Eagle County – Union Pacific’s Tennessee Pass Line.
For more information about all of this, go to the Western Rail Coalition website, and if you’re sick of the state’s never-ending I-70 nightmare, reach out to CDOT officials and let them know.
Editor’s note: The O. Zone is a recurring opinion column by RealVail.com publisher David O. Williams. Please read how you can help support this site by considering a donation or signing up for news alerts … or both.
David O. Williams
