 Glenwood Springs Amtrak station. Photo by sfgamchick on flickr. |
There are 9 Amtrak stations in Colorado. Denver’s Union Station is by far the biggest and busiest, but what about the others? Amtrak’s Colorado fact sheet can tell us.
Here are the 9 stations, ranked in order from busiest to least-used.
- Denver: 113,393 riders/year
- Glenwood Springs: 33,245 riders/year
- Grand Junction: 31,999 riders/year
- Winter Park – Fraser: 7,162 riders/year
- La Junta: 6,566 riders/year
- Trinidad: 4,770 riders/year
- Granby: 3,528 riders/year
- Fort Morgan: 3,343 riders/year
- Lamar: 1,936 riders/year
Do you know if Amtrak is expecting an increase in service/usage from DUS due to the completion of it? If so do they have estimates? I’d imagine many people don’t even realize that Amtrak has service here because of the renovations.
Amtrak has not published any estimates.
Amtrak will be kind of back to where it was before when it returns to Denver Union Station; I would not expect Amtrak to have predicted anything special due merely to the renovation.
However, once the bus terminal opens in May, and once the new rail lines open in 2016, one would expect more passengers to use Amtrak due to the new connections.
There are no current plans for additional Amtrak trains; any such train would probably have to have state or local support (== dollars). Amtrak has talked about putting more cars on the California Zephyr, but it doesn’t have more cars to put on it.
FWIW, if you want to start a political pressure group to try to get the state & localities to fund more Amtrak service, I’d aim for a Fort Collins to Denver corridor.
This has synergies with RTD’s planned “Northwest Rail” to Boulder and Longmont (it’s the same route) — *and* we already know that Fort Collins, Loveland, and Larimer County think it’s a good idea, from previous studies they’ve done. It’s also the sort of route which has been highly popular in other places.
I would love to see the often discussed, but little new movement on, Cheyenee to Pueblo train happen. Fort Collins to Denver would be a great first step but the entire corridor would see a major benefit from that, in my opinion.