Colorado is the model for the next generation of passenger rail (Trains.com)

By Amit Bose and John Putnam

For anyone interested in the future of intercity passenger rail in North America, Colorado is the state to watch this fall.

On Election Day, Colorado voters will decide whether to provide a dedicated, permanent source of funding for the Colorado Connector, or CoCo. CoCo is an intercity passenger rail system connecting communities along the Front Range between Fort Collins, Denver, and Pueblo.

Passenger rail here is hardly a new idea. Service was lost in the 1960s and concepts to restore it date back to the 1980s. What has changed is the convergence of priorities, partnerships and resources needed to turn the concept into a corridor with a practical path forward.

The corridor has long looked like one of the country’s leading candidates for passenger rail for a number of reasons. Front Range communities account for roughly 85% of Colorado’s population and 86% of its jobs. Existing freight railroad infrastructure connects much of the corridor, while Interstate 25 experiences significant congestion and serves as the region’s primary north-south connection.

Before asking voters for additional tax funding, Colorado developed Joint Service in 2024 to make as much progress as possible on the stalled Northwest Rail corridor. Denver’s RTD became a funding partner, and the resulting plan calls for three daily round trips between Fort Collins and Denver beginning in 2029, independently of the new sales-tax question.

That sequencing matters. It demonstrates that Colorado can begin delivering passenger rail rather than asking voters to finance an entirely conceptual system. The question is whether to fund a much larger system, with Full Corridor Service reaching from Fort Collins to Pueblo by 2032 and incremental investments continuing through 2045. Ballot Issue 7A would fund this expansion with a third of a penny sales tax within the Front Range Passenger Rail District.

What makes Colorado interesting for passenger rail, however, is not simply the scale of the proposed system. It is the way the pieces are being assembled.

CoCo is being developed around existing infrastructure and in close collaboration with the host railroads, rather than treating those railroads as obstacles to overcome later. The goal is to establish the operating relationship, identify needed capacity improvements, and create a commercial framework for passenger service from the beginning. Colorado is pursuing direct access agreements both on the Front Range Subdivision and through the Moffat Road into the Rockies in which host railroads are directly compensated for providing access to their infrastructure.

Taken individually, none of these ideas is new. That is precisely why the Colorado approach is worth watching. The innovation is in combining proven elements into a single strategy: work with the host railroad. Establish a defined operating relationship. Create a reliable source of dedicated revenue. Use existing infrastructure wherever it makes sense. Start with service that can actually be delivered rather than waiting for the ultimate railroad to be complete. Then use the experience of operating trains to determine where additional infrastructure, capacity and frequency will generate the greatest return. This is how the Utah Front Runner and the California Capitol Corridor succeeded in a careful, prudent way.

Colorado has spent years working through the questions of route, partners, delivery, and funding, including operations modeling through service development planning under a federal CRISI grant from 2021. The Federal Railroad Administration has spent the past several years building a national pipeline for new, expanded, and restored intercity passenger rail through its Corridor ID and major federal capital programs. The Colorado Front Range was already in that pipeline and was a model for how to plan and develop service. The opportunity now is to show what happens when a corridor moves beyond planning by putting trains into service and voting on dedicated and permanent funding.

For decades, American passenger rail development has too often been trapped between an appealing corridor and an enormous capital project requiring federal dollars to complete. CoCo is taking a different route: start with what can realistically be delivered, put trains on the railroad, establish the operating relationship, build the market, and then invest in the infrastructure and frequency needed to make the service more useful.

If Colorado can execute that approach, it will give the rest of the country something passenger rail needs: another visible win of a new corridor moving from concept to operation quickly and then expanding.

CoCo demonstrates that the United States can take a strong corridor, assemble the right partners, put trains on tracks in a way that benefits passengers, and makes the system better over time. If it does, CoCo will be evidence that the next generation of American passenger rail can be built incrementally, commercially, and pragmatically, without waiting decades for federal investment.

Amit Bose served as administrator of the Federal Railroad Administration from 2022 to 2025. He oversaw the safety of the U.S. rail network and Infrastructure Investment and Job Act’s (IIJA) historic $66 billion rail program. Bose also served on the boards of Amtrak and Union Station Redevelopment Corp.

John Putnam was the general counsel for the U.S. Department of Transportation, where he was involved with the implementation of the Infrastructure Investment of Jobs Act of 2021 across all modes. Putnam also served as a senior advisor to the Colorado Department of Transportation for rail and transit matters and served as the governor’s chief negotiator for the Moffat Tunnel lease renewal. He is currently a transportation attorney at Kaplan Kirsch LLP in Denver, and has worked on developing rail, airport, energy, and other infrastructure for more than 30 years.