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The O. Zone: Will Colorado’s next guv be as gung-ho about passenger rail as ‘Pullman Polis’?
Gov. Jared Polis on a demo hydrogen train locomotive in 2023.
As term-limited Colorado Gov. Jared Polis hits the road and heads back to Boulder next year — I know, he never really left — it will likely be on a potholed road undergoing some form of never-ending and inadequate repair.
That’s because there are really only two seasons in Colorado now — ski season and road-construction season – and no matter what any governor does in the Centennial State, it will never be enough to satisfy too many drivers on too few roads in a harsh, unforgiving, mountainous climate.
Recognizing that, Polis has tried to provide alternatives to automobiles, presiding over most of the 10 years now of Bustang by celebrating more than 350,000 riders statewide in 2024-25. Last ski season, the Winter Park Express Ski Train, boosted by funding from passenger-rail fees, saw a huge surge in ridership, including this longtime passenger-rail advocate. And he inked a deal with Union Pacific to get the state three roundtrip passenger trains a day through the state-owned Moffat Tunnel, which UP will continue to maintain.
Now Polis, with the backing of similarly rail-brained state lawmakers, is hell-bent on increasing the frequency of the ski train and the distance its travels, pushing it on to the Steamboat Springs and eventually Hayden and Craig. That’s great, in my opinion, although I’d love to see some of those trains stop locally when they pass through Eagle County. And it would also make sense for at least one passenger train a day between Denver and Grand Junction, again with a local stop.
But those will be funding-challenged hurdles for the state’s next governor. Polis, meanwhile, will go down as the guv who gave a passenger-rail revival into the mountains a huge kick in the caboose while also getting a handle on the FasTracks travesty of long-taxed but never-delivered passenger rail between Denver and Boulder (that would have been a good way to hit the road next year) with his vision for Front Range Passenger Rail between Fort Collins and Pueblo.
Will all of this come to fruition so we can eventually crown him Gov. Gandy Dancer, Pullman Polis or some other rail-themed moniker akin to Amtrak Joe? Well, it would have been a lot easier if the aforementioned Biden hadn’t blown last year’s presidential election to rail-hater, limo lover and Lolita Express frequent flyer Donald Trump, who is busily trying to defund passenger rail and deregulate the freight rail industry.
But even with a fossil-fuel fetishist in the White House, trying desperately to cede renewable technology fully to China while setting U.S. energy policy back a century, good things may still be happening on the passenger rail front. Having never met a merger he doesn’t like, especially if it comes with some fat side payments, Trump will no doubt fast track a UP-Norfolk Southern merger that could mean a seamless coast-to-coast freight network. That might lead to some form of better interstate passenger service than Amtrak currently offers.
Or it could lead to even more two-mile-long toxic freight trains jamming the tracks and delaying passenger trains. Unions are already opposing the merger and saying it will lead to safety shortcuts and more Norfolk Southern derailment disasters like the one in East Palestine, Ohio. Look for the Trump administration to side with freight carriers in that never-ending battle.
And look for freight carriers to always have the upper hand. That’s because they own the tracks on pay to maintain them, charging exorbitant fees for passenger carriers such as Amtrak and other private companies to move people on those tracks.
Our road system, on the other hand is paid for by your tax dollars in what amounts to a huge subsidy to the trucking industry, which obviously contributes some taxes and fees but clearly not enough in Colorado given the sheer volume of trucks and the fragility of our mountain roads.
Republican Mark Hillman, a former journalist and state lawmaker, recently wrote in the Vail Daily that the reason Colorado can’t have good roads is because too much state spending is being diverted to alternative forms of transportation. What he failed to mention is that no matter how many billions of dollars taxpayers dump into pavement projects, it will never be enough.
I wrote this in the Vail Daily in 2023: “According to the Colorado Department of Transportation, it has only been able to increase lane miles (basically road capacity) 2.6% between 1990 to 2023. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Colorado’s population during that time has increased from 3,304,000 to an estimated 2023 population of 5,913,000, or 78.8%. If the roads seem crowded, that’s why.” And our taxes and spending for road repairs is inadequate to address that discrepancy, especially as climate change ravages our road infrastructure.
I’ve never interviewed Polis on the topic of passenger rail, instead trying to pin him down on Utah’s oil train expansion, but our current governor is clear on the topic. “Pothole Polis”, as Hillman refers to him (ignoring that Hillman benefactor and the last Colorado GOP Gov. Bill Owens could be called the same), rightly sees transportation and housing as inextricably linked:
“A big part of the speech today is about transit-oriented community,” Polis told CPR after his State of the State Speech in 2024. “So, yes, it’s about having access to bus and rail, but it’s also more people should have the opportunity to live affordably near a bus and rail stop. It’s both of those and the two very much go hand in hand because the more people live close to transit and for whom it’s convenient, the more customers there are for bus and rail and that drives the economy of scale. It drives the efficiency and reduces the cost, increasing the scheduled service for those transit opportunities. So they all really tie together.”
Mountain Rail is seen as both a workforce commuter line that will connect affordable housing in Craig and Hayden to resort jobs in Steamboat, as well as cheaper housing in Kremmling and Granby to Winter Park, but also get tourists from DIA and the Yampa Valley airport in Hayden to Steamboat and Winter Park. There is clearly a high-end market for rail passengers who want a more relaxing way to visit the nation’s best scenery and outdoor recreation opportunities. Check out this rebrand and expansion of the Rocky Mountaineer that also doesn’t stop here locally.
To be clear, both Amtrak and the Rocky Mountaineer currently pass through the unincorporated Eagle County communities of Bond and Dotsero without slowing down. And there’s another rail line that also passes through Dotsero but only sees occasional trains from the Gypsum wallboard plant. That stretch to Pueblo is called the Tennessee Pass Line and is currently out of service.
I recently asked both of the Democrats seeking to replace Polis where they stood on his attempted passenger-rail revival, and it was clear to me it’s likely a pretty low priority for both of them – somewhat understandably. The rising cost of Medicaid and looming lack of funding for the federal program thanks to Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” seems to blow a billion-dollar hole in Colorado’s budget every other month, necessitating huge spending cuts in coming years.
Those cuts will inevitably lead to less spending for rural hospitals, schools, roads and other forms of critical Colorado human infrastructure. Gubernatorial frontrunner and current U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet is campaigning on making Colorado affordable for our kids to actually live, work and play here for years to come. That’s a smart tactic for courting the youth vote.
I asked Bennet after an event in Frisco last month if he is looking to move the Polis passenger rail legacy forward as a youth-vote issue, with many of the millennials and Gen Z voters I’ve talked to strongly favoring alternatives to our overburdened, underfunded road network: “Do you think people want alternatives to our broken roads?”
“I think people do. I think people do,” Bennet told me as he ran off to another event. Now that could mean more drop-in-the-bucket spending on pavement projects, but I took it the other way. Hopefully, I’ll get more out of him on the topic next time I get a chance, although, obviously, there are much bigger issues to contend with in 2026.
Bennet’s main primary opponent next year, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, gave me a little more on the topic in a sit-down interview in Edwards last month:
“I think there’s real interesting promise for passenger rail to take people off of I-70 to provide more engagement and commerce and recreation in Northwest Colorado,” Weiser said of Mountain Rail. “It’s an exciting opportunity. I’m not as familiar with the details, but broadly, conceptually, yes, the idea is very appealing. I’m not sure what the timing is to make it all a reality and I haven’t looked at the finances.”
Weiser, an ardent opponent, along with Bennet, of increased oil-train traffic from Utah, was unaware of local efforts to at least study revived passenger rail on the Tennessee Pass Line.
CORE Transit Executive Director Tanya Allen, in an interview in Minturn in late June, said the biggest hurdles to achieving CORE’s 10-year plan to increase bus service in Eagle County by 50% are the constraints of inadequate transit centers in key hubs such as the Chambers Park and Ride near the Eagle roundabout, Avon Station and the Vail Transportation Center:
“So what we find is as we try to add more and more buses, as Bustang adds more buses, as the Town of Vail adds more buses, as we see also increases in ride share and hotel shuttles and all the other transportation providers that are coming in and out of [transit centers], finding the space to pull in, pull out and circulate safety is going to be a challenge as we add more buses onto routes,” Allen said, adding she is in favor of at least studying the possibility of local passenger rail on UP’s Tennessee Pass tracks, which Rio Grande Pacific holds a lease to explore.
Locally, as advocates push for what would be an even more scenic route than Amtrak’s California Zephyr and the Winter Park Express Ski Train – a Glenwood Springs to Leadville train – it’s clear it would solve many of the same problems Mountain Rail is looking to take on: reviving rural areas losing mining and other jobs and connecting affordable housing to resort areas while also serving high-end tourists by connecting to the Eagle County Regional Airport.
But perhaps the biggest benefit would be taking pressure off woefully underfunded I-70 and providing an alternative to the pave-baby-pave, old-school mindset Hillman represents. Even if we could find the taxpayer funds for it, do we really want to eight-lane I-70 through our mountains? Why not fund other ways to take pressure off our vital east-west lifeline?
As Vail and Beaver Creek look to the next 60 years, I would urge all of our local elected officials, planners and engineers to at least study alternative ways of doing business, housing workers, moving people and sustainably powering our rural-resort economy. What we are doing right now is not working that well, nor is it sustainable into the not-so-distant future.
As companies pitch rail solutions for upcoming international events such as soccer’s World Cup in 2026 and the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles in 2028, wouldn’t it make sense to pursue a high-end ski train concept connecting Colorado and Utah for the 2034 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, especially if there’s already a summer version of that product? And then why not have lower-cost commuter rail for the workers who will staff those events?
The two greatest ski states in the nation should be connected by a ski train, and Vail and Eagle County – synonymous with our great sport – could and should be a big part of that transformation. Or at the very least we should plan for that possibility.
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
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