Everything you need to know about Colorado’s NEW Train (Trains are Awesome)

An interview between Trains are Awesome and James Flattum, Director of Outreach for Coloradans for CoCo, the campaign to pass Issue 7 in 2026 to support the Colorado Connector.

TRANSCRIPT:

Transcript of a Trains Are Awesome video featuring James Flattum, Director of Outreach for Coloradans for CoCo. Lightly edited for clarity.

The case for CoCo

Trains Are Awesome: 2026. What a year it has been. It's almost November, and that means it's election season. Across the United States on November 3rd, voters will head to the polls to make decisions about a range of candidates and topics. All of these topics are important, but they're not all fun. If only we could vote for trains or something. Well, some people can.

I have said this many times in my videos before: trains are political. That doesn't mean they only belong to one side. What I mean is that the decisions on where to run trains and how much money to give them are decided by the political process. If you're living in Colorado, you have a chance to be part of that political process and vote for CoCo.

CoCo is short for the Colorado Connector. Here's what this new train service will look like. CoCo is the state-supported intercity rail service that will run along the Front Range in Colorado. Phase 1 is opening in 2029, with trains running from Denver to Fort Collins via places like Westminster, Boulder, and Longmont. Any future expansion, including higher frequencies and a southern extension to Pueblo, is up to the voters in November. Here at Trains Are Awesome, we highly encourage everyone eligible to vote yes on Issue 7A.

Understanding Proposition 7A

Trains Are Awesome: But we're not just going to tell you to vote yes. We'll tell you how to find more information, what you get when you vote yes, and why it's important. The 2 p.m. traffic conditions of 2050 are going to look like the 5 p.m. apocalypse we have today. And I'm lucky to be joined today by a guest who knows way more about this than I do.

James Flattum: My name is James Flattum. I'm the Director of Outreach for the Coloradans for CoCo campaign. This is a public ballot measure (Issue 7A) in Colorado, or a specific subset of Colorado, the Front Range cities, to build a new intercity passenger train service extending from Fort Collins to Denver, and then Denver south to Colorado Springs and Pueblo. Realistically, we know today, based on the most serious studies that have been done, that the traffic on I-25 is not getting better, and we need an alternative that gives people a way out of traffic.

Trains Are Awesome: So, Issue 7A. What exactly are you voting for if you vote yes?

James: What's on the ballot is for residents of the Front Range Passenger Rail District. A simplified view of who that is: basically all of the areas that are receiving or proposed to receive service with the Colorado Connector. North to south, the cities from Fort Collins down to Boulder, the Denver metro area, as well as Colorado Springs and Pueblo. Places that have a station, roughly a five-mile radius around that.

The Front Range is one of the most obvious places in the country for a new intercity rail line, because it is a chain of cities almost in a straight line. The Colorado Connector, with just one line, provides train service to the majority of people in Colorado. The Front Range is a really dense region at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, and broadly speaking represents about 85% of the Colorado population. It's the densest, most heavily populated part of the state. This is the single biggest corridor you can target for new passenger train service in Colorado.

Planning and transparency

Trains Are Awesome: We're going to go into more detail about how this ties into other rail projects and what trains and tracks CoCo will use. But first, where can voters find all the information they need to make an informed decision?

James: I think the best single source of truth for CoCo, the one that tells the full picture, is a document called the Delivery Plan. You can get it at coloradoconnector.com/plan. The Delivery Plan is designed to be a one-stop shop to answer all the questions: where are the places that are going to be served, what is the train service going to be like, what does the phasing and implementation plan look like, and what's it going to look like 20 years from now?

Learning from past mistakes

Trains Are Awesome: If you were in Colorado in 2004, you may be thinking right now, hey, didn't we already vote for trains? You're not wrong. In 2004, Coloradans voted for the FasTracks program, which was supposed to bring electrified regional rail to the region surrounding Denver. It was just in the Denver metro area, so it was a smaller geography than what we're talking about today with the Front Range, but it was really ambitious. Some of that was built. For example, the A Line, which connects Denver Union Station to the airport and is one of my favorite rail lines in the entire country. But not all of the promises of FasTracks were fulfilled. There is still no train service to Boulder.

James: I think the biggest challenge we've got as Colorado Connector is that FasTracks fundamentally overpromised and underdelivered. It built a lot of really important infrastructure. The neighborhood I live in is Denver Union Station. This was former rail yards 30 years ago, brought to life as basically the liveliest part of downtown Denver today. It also built the A Line, I think one of the highest-performing airport-to-downtown connectors in the entire country.

But only about 75% of the promised tracks were delivered, and the biggest missing piece in terms of mileage was the Northwest line, extending northwest of Westminster to the suburbs of Broomfield and Louisville, the city of Boulder, and the city of Longmont. This was the biggest piece that was missing, and it overlaps with our corridor. What was being advanced 22 years ago was commuter rail. We're talking about a longer-distance train service today, an intercity train that extends a full 190 miles up and down the corridor.

RTD, as part of FasTracks, did build a connection to the northwest, up as far as 72nd Street in Westminster, a neighboring suburb. This built electrified track that allows us to leap over the biggest points of congestion of any of the freight railroads in Colorado. We get north of Utah Junction on dedicated, passenger-only electric track, which is awesome. So we can work with RTD to get service going to the north. This allows us to start service far quicker than we could if it didn't exist already, and then build a tie-in with the host railroad in Westminster and use the freight tracks as far north as Fort Collins.

The starter service strategy

Trains Are Awesome: The initial CoCo service in 2029 will only see three round trips a day, which isn't much, but the people at CoCo know this.

James: Fundamentally, there was a strategy to kickstart train service before, and separate from, the ballot measure we're talking about today. Ballot measure 7A is about building phases 2 through 5 of the Colorado Connector project. There is a separate and independent starter service that is already making progress today, and that is going to kickstart train service really fast in the northwest segment from Fort Collins to Denver with three round trips a day, starting in 2029.

The light-speed timeline of that is made possible by the strategy to reuse existing track. The question was: how can we introduce the most train service possible before asking the voters for more taxes of some kind? The joint service, the starter service concept, was created as a partnership. RTD, the regional transit operator that had promised the train service 22 years ago, had a bit of savings left over from the FasTracks project that hadn't been spent yet. Combine that with new state revenue from fees the Colorado legislature created on rental cars and oil and gas back in 2024, and you get a pot of money bigger than anything RTD could afford by itself as the local operator. That's what gets service going.

That's the $332 million starter service, which in the scheme of things, from an infrastructure standpoint, as a lot of your viewers might recognize, is actually really cheap.

Trains Are Awesome: What I really like about CoCo is that it's not just bringing intercity rail service to a state that's perfect for it, but that it's also being a good steward of state resources and taking advantage of infrastructure that already exists.

James: It's intended to be an incremental strategy that can get train service going independently of the future ballot measure for the full corridor.

Expanding for the future

James: That way, when we talk to voters in the northwest who are concerned, and very rightly so, about double taxation, we can make sure they are going to be getting value for their money: that their tax dollars for the last 22 years are going to install a first phase of the train service, three round trips a day.

At the same time, we know three round trips a day is not good enough. It's not good enough for residents. We've heard them up and down the corridor. That is the huge importance of ballot measure 7A. It is going to unlock permanent funding that gets us to a full 10 round trips per day in the north, from Fort Collins to Denver, and eight round trips a day between Denver and Pueblo.

The way we are prioritizing the implementation of the project, we needed to address a lot of the skepticism created by projects in other parts of the country that took longer to deliver than the initial promise. So we wanted to get train service going quickly, end to end, top to bottom, within five years of passing permanent new funding. The way we could do that was by reusing existing track infrastructure largely as it exists today, focusing on installing a basic level of service to start, so that we could prove that no part of the District was going to be waiting generations for future service.

The cool part is that we are going to maximize all of the capacity we can realistically get out of this existing freight-operated infrastructure today. But to build out to 10 round trips a day in the north and eight round trips in the south, we do need to expand the physical infrastructure to run trains reliably. That means adding a lot of double track up and down the corridor, as well as building crossovers, which are vital to deconflict us from freight train movements.

A huge part of the strategy is working honestly with the host railroads, which have existing businesses they are running on these corridors today. When we look at models of what has worked across the rest of the country, the Capitol Corridor in California is a great example. We think expansions of frequency will happen a lot faster if the underlying starter service and those earlier phases work really, really well from a reliability standpoint. The host railroad is then more likely to accept and support a faster expansion of service. It's all about reliability.

Equipment and operations

Trains Are Awesome: So, phase 1 from Denver to Fort Collins, three times a day. That's set in stone. It's happening in 2029. But it's not enough. To make CoCo an all-day, frequent intercity service that connects the entire Front Range, you need to vote. If you're living in Colorado's Front Range, the places that CoCo will serve, the best thing to do is to vote yes on Proposition 7A. In the description under the video, I have a ton of links. I have information about the train service. There's a form you can sign to show your support. Anything you need to make an informed decision. Now, the question on everybody's mind: what trains will CoCo use?

James: The starter service is a little more certain. We know that Amtrak is going to be our operator for phase 1. But the Front Range Passenger Rail District has made the commitment to Colorado that it will have an open procurement process for phases 2 through 5, to make sure we're being fair and that we're putting together the best operation we possibly can for the people of Colorado.

So the first thing is, it's Amtrak. We expect that from 2029 into the early 2030s we're probably going to be looking at some sort of used fleet, given that the timeline to procure a new fleet like the new Airos is going to be the early to mid 2030s. If Amtrak becomes the operator for the more built-out phases 2 through 5, we think it's almost certain you would see Airo trains running, since that is the emerging standard for Amtrak today.

Ultimately the fleet is going to be connected to the operator. Whoever wins phases 2 through 5, if it's not Amtrak, there could potentially be more choices out there. But I think a lot of your viewers know what's available, because there really are only three major manufacturers providing contemporary passenger equipment at scale in the US right now.

The good news for all voters, and all potential riders who are interested in riding this in Colorado, is that all three of the major variants have gone above and beyond. Not just meeting the letter of the law on ADA accessibility requirements, but being far more comfortable, having boarding procedures with significantly more dignity to them, and offering dual-mode variants that can run seamlessly and switch between onboard diesel generators and overhead wires. I think we are very privileged to be looking at this question today, because we just have so many more options than we did even 20 years ago.

Trains Are Awesome: While it's not confirmed that it will be the Airos that run on CoCo, if you want to see a review of those, you can find one on my channel. I'll be sure to link it.

James: I would rather live in a Colorado of 2050 that has CoCo as an option, when we know I-25 is going to be even worse. Even if we were to spend billions of dollars adding lanes, we know that doesn't work. So I think the biggest thing is: let's follow a proven way to give people another option, a way out of traffic, so that our version of the 2050 commute is going to be significantly more comfortable.

National implications

Trains Are Awesome: If you don't live in Colorado, why should you care?

James: For everyone across the country who doesn't live in Colorado, keep a sharp eye, because if our project is successful, we think it could create tailwinds for other projects in other parts of the country that are looking to install intercity passenger service and do it within the resources that are possible at a state level. We're going to be a really interesting case study on another way to get service going faster. So definitely, this November 3rd, keep your eye on Colorado.

Trains Are Awesome: A huge thanks to James for his time today, and a shout out to all the people who have been working hard to make the Colorado Connector a reality.