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Who cares if passenger rail disappears ?

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Strangely enough the UP, SantaFe and the Great Northern had a real hard time finding suficient cause to present to the ICC to get them out of the passenger business and It wasn't until AmTrak was created and demanded they hand over the business that they actually did get rid of the long distance trains. The Rio Grande continued to run the Zepher into the 1980's until AmTrak took over the central corridor route and today the ski train still runs every week end year arround from Denver to Winter Park. The Denver Regional Transportation District wants to run heavy rail commuter trains from Cheyenne down into New Mexico but the 30+ freight/coal trains a day that they would have to share the right of way with make that impossible so they are going to see if they can get the UP/BNSF to move the coal traffic to lines farther east. There initial contact apparently had the BNSF management rolling arround on the floor holding their stomachs shouting "You want to do What ??". On a snowy day it is possible to have a 40 mile long parking lot on I25 ( on a good day its only about 10 miles long). Tthe RTD light rail system in metro Denver has received over whelming support and is being extended and proposed Heavy rail commuter trains will probably be running as far South as Castle Rock by 2005. <br /> <br />The secret to having a passenger rail network may lie in tieing Regional commutter systems together. In the west most of these systems would run north to south in so much as the cities are to far apart east to west They would use existing surplus railroad right of way and would most likely contract with the freight railroads for maintence but do their own dispatching.
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