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Blog Entry 5 of 8 WebViking's Corner

I'm a libertarian/conservative who believes the first precept of good government should be "Do no harm!" That said I recognize that, as distasteful as it is, sometimes government is necessary and can do good. I'll be talking mainly about national politics, with the occasional odd foray into local issue.

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Update on RTD's north rail corridor

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Contributed by: John Newman on 6/25/2007

I live in Northglenn and voted for Fast-Trax so I have watched RTD's planning process for the North Corridor rail line with interest. My biggest gripe about Fast-Trax has been start building already. It's hard for me to believe that we voted for this in 2006 and it's going to be 2016 before we see any real results.

I hate to compare my adopted state of Colorado to my native state of New Mexico, but look at what they've done with the New Mexico Rail Runner commuter rail line in the Middle Rio Grande valley. It's tough giving Bill Richardson credit for anything because I disagree so strongly with most of his views, but he did bring commuter rail to Albuquerque in less than three years.

The New Mexico Rail Runner (http://www.nmrailrunner.com/) runs from Belen, NM, through Albuquerque, all the way up to Bernalillo, NM, with plans to extend it to Santa Fe. The funding was approved by the State Legislature in 2003, and it started limited service in the spring of 2006. Phase I, covering the 50 mile plus distance between Belen and Bernalillo is now complete. Like most of RTD's plans for Fast-Trax, the NM Rail Runner runs along existing tracks.

Now admittedly RTD's plans even for the North Corridor alone are bigger than New Mexico's Rail Runner. More stations, more trains, more passengers and more work required to upgrade and realign tracks, but c'mon, if New Mexico can build a 50 mile commuter railway in around 4 years, why is it taking Colorado a decade?

Anyway, the wheels of Fast-Trax slowly crank along, and recently RTD held community meetings to talk about some of the concerns about the North Corridor project. Presentations and handouts from those meetings can be found here (http://www.rtd-fastracks.com/nm_71).

As you may or may not know, RTD is planning to use existing line to run commuter rail on in the North Corridor. This line will be roughly parallel to I-25 on the east side of the freeway and run from Union Station (which will become the regional transit center for the Denver Metro area) all the way to 162nd Avenue) a distance of roughly 31 miles.

Part of the problem with RTD's whole rail system is that it's going to probably end up as a mixed system. What RTD has built now is light rail. In other words, overhead powered, light rail cars that cannot run on existing freight tracks like what RTD is planning on running for a lot of it's Fast-Trax Corridors. So that means North Corridor trains won't be able to run on existing light rail tracks. Which makes the whole system a lot more complicated and expensive than it should be.

In any case, RTD is planning on using either overhead Electric Multiple Units or Diesel Multiple Units on it's North Corridor. What the Multiple Units of those terms implies is that each car will have it's own motors to propel it, either electirc or diesel, rather than a locomotive like Amtrak or freight trains have, pulling unpowered cars. But these units, since they will be running on freight tracks along with the existing freight traffic have to be bigger than the light rail units that RTD runs now.

The trade offs between the two types is that with Diesel Multiple Units, RTD would not have to run overhead electric lines along the route, while they would if they choose Electric Multiple Units. However, Electric Multiple Units are a lot quieter than Diesel Multiple Units, and these tracks do run through existing residential areas. My guess is that they are going to end up wiring the route and going with EMU's, just froma global warming/air quality standpoint plus the added benefit of quieter trains.

I'm not really concerned either way what they choose, by the time they get around to actually putting trains on the track, they can probably go with bio-diesel or hydrogen fuel cells or some other exotic motive power. But what I do care about is the stations. Where are they going to locate the stations?

I was disappointed to see their first list of far north area stations, because they included stations on or near 88th, 100th, 112th, 124th, 144th, and 162nd. Now at first glance, you might think, yeah that sounds about right. You don't want the stations to close together, because it would take forever to get downtown. And you do want enough of them, to encourage people to ride the train. If the only two stops are 162nd and Union Station, not many people are going to ride the train.

Please note, I just listed the fart north stations here. They are also planning stations south of 88th, a Commerce City station, a Swansea station, a Colosseum station and 40th and 40th station, The location of these stations is even more up in the air that the Northern stations because there are some grade improvements RTD needs to make to the route, so they're not completely sure of the route yet.

However, they do seem to have settled on the stations I mentioned above for the north end of the corridor and the first thing that jumped out at me was of those 6 east-west streets they picked to locate a station on, only two, 88th and 144th are streets that actually cross I-25. Oh sure, 112th, sort of crosses I-25, but it ends in a residential neighborhood long before it gets to the track.

And it seems to me that putting a station on the streets that cross I-25 does the most to encourage people on the west side of I-25 to use the rail.

If you live in the North suburbs of Denver, you quickly figure out that traffic is a lot worse than it needs to be, because the roads were designed with so little foresight. You do have the basic grid in most areas, but it's interrupted by kind of a three pronged Y, with US-36 going northwest, I-25 going straight north, and I-76 going northeast. The major north-south streets manage to cross US-36 and I-76 pretty easily when they need to, but there are major problems with east-west streets managing to cross all three freeways. In fact, the only one that does it is 104th.

And as RTD themselves note, there's a lot of east-west traffic that would get sucked into a North Corridor rail line to a regional transit hub downtown.

In any case, I asked RTD about their station selection process and discovered some things I didn't know specifically about. Stations have to be on straight sections of track a minimum of 85 feet from curves and have a grade no greater than 1% for example. They need to be 300 feet from an at grade crossing of a street.

And obviously land has to be available, and there are environmental and other considerations to make. And in fact, in the materials they recently release on their website, it looks like a couple of these stations will and up closer to the street that crosses I-25 than the street that RTD has as the cross streets. For example the station at 100th, looks like it will end up much closer to 104th than I initially thought.

In any case, RTD should be releasing their Preferred Alternatives for the station location sometime this month or next which should give us a better idea of their locations and also what they may end up looking like. Most if not all of the stations on the northern end of the corridor will be park and ride stations as well.

So some progress. RTD continues to inch along and in another 9 years, I may be taking rail when I want to go downtown.

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John Newman

Northglenn , CO

John Newman has posted 8 blog entries and 33 comments since joining on 9/27/2005. John Newman 's average blog rating is 3.64.

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