The State of Colorado recently created a special taxation district to fund a Front Range passenger rail service concept that could eventually put 50 trains per day through Union Station, connecting Denver with Ft. Collins, Colorado Springs and points beyond. And now, the US DOT is making up to $1.8 billion available for the “pre-construction development” of selected commuter/passenger rail corridors of this sort. As funding sources like this emerge, it becomes more likely that Front Range Coloradans will have a post-pandemic transit resource at hand that makes less frequent commutes by train faster and easier than those daily pre-pandemic slogs over congested area roadways.
But unless something truly transformative happens, these trains will share the corridor with up to 25 longer, slower freight trains each day. This will frustrate passenger train performance, compromise service reliability and impair the synergistic development of passenger-oriented trackside real estate. For the host freight railroad, it will complicate operating and maintenance activities, intensify safety concerns and have a chilling effect on attracting boxcar shippers to up-zoned and gentrifying trackside real estate. Separating freight and passenger rights-of-way is preferable, then, when and where it can be done.
Fortunately, it can be done here using an Eastern Colorado Freight Bypass network to move nearly all freight trains off the more populated Front Range corridor to freight-friendly segments centered further east at Greeley and Limon. Here’s how the Bypass, as illustrated below, would work:
North of Denver, all freights operating to/from Fort Collins via Boulder would move to a parallel route between Cheyenne and Denver via Greeley that is far more suitable for today’s longer, slower freights. A couple daily trains would remain to serve industries north of Fort Collins but none will go south, making Fort Collins and Loveland downtowns freight train free.
South of Denver, all coal trains and most mixed carload freights now running via Denver, Colorado Springs and Pueblo/La Junta would relocate to a 150-mile combination of new and existing tracks between the Brush and La Junta areas via Limon. That will save each train up to 200 miles per round trip via flatter and straighter eastern plains routing and leave the South Front Range coal train free. A couple daily Denver-Pueblo mixed carload freights could remain, but they would operate off-peak and overnight to avoid passenger train interference.
What ultimately makes this massive realignment work for passenger usage, though, is that most local carload shippers outside of central Denver have already left the corridor for lower cost sites to the east, while trackside coal-fired power plants in Boulder and Colorado Springs have either closed or converted to pipeline-delivered gas. The few remaining carload shippers, mostly near Longmont and Loveland, can either use trucks or other rail spurs, as shown, to reach surviving freight lines. With local and overhead freight thus relocated, the corridor frees-up for people-oriented investment and deployment.
But the Bypass is much more than a feel-good environmental statement, with ancillary benefits going well beyond emissions and grade crossing delay reductions to include extensive, unimpaired, right-of-way bike/hike trails, a north-south rail outlet for eastern plains wheat, construction jobs and a new market for Pueblo-made steel rails.
And the Bypass will save money. Past studies suggest about $4 billion in 2021 dollars to build the bypass as depicted and to acquire underlying right-of-way real estate. Compare that to recent $4 to $10+ billion estimates by CDOT for additional Front Range passenger track capacity and safety infrastructure just to meet the host freight railroad’s shared-use capacity and safety standards. Building the Bypass instead and then partially financing corridor real estate acquisition through track and station-side land appreciation would effectively separate passengers and freight AND save taxpayers hundreds of millions.
There are, as always, challenges, with freight railroad and eastern plains landowner cooperation standing out. But with big-picture infrastructure ventures like this finding bi-partisan favor and with active participation by committed Front Range civic and industrial leaders, these challenges can be met, making the Eastern Colorado Freight Bypass a venture as big and grand as the mountains towering over the Front Range (passenger) corridor itself.
Jerome Johnson is a retired transportation economist and consultant who specialized in rail corridor transactions.
Joe Kneib is an international transportation infrastructure consultant based in Colorado Springs.
Jerome Johnson is a retired transportation economist and consultant who specialized in rail corridor transactions. Joe Kneib is an international transportation infrastructure consultant based in Colorado Springs.