Colorado's Front Range Passenger Rail reaches milestone agreement

Colorado's Front Range Passenger Rail project is full steam ahead. Officials announced a preliminary agreement has been reached with BNSF Rail, the company that owns the tracks the train will run on. 

It's been a long time coming, decades to be exact, to get a train through the Northwest Corridor, and the project has a lot of people excited. 

"Everything's expensive right now," Derrick Martin-Armsted told CBS Colorado. "The best thing that ever happened in Colorado was this."

The possibility of being able to hop on a train at Union Station that will take you to Boulder, Fort Collins and cities in between is something to cheer for.

"It's going to save gas prices," Martin-Armsted added. "It's going to help people be able to commute, probably save accidents. I mean, this is amazing."

Others riding the commuter training at Union Station Thursday afternoon shared in the excitement.

"If it went up to Fort Collins, I would love to go up there," Steven Escobar told CBS Colorado. "It's really close to Wyoming and stuff like that. I would definitely ride it up to Fort Collins, or even Pueblo."

Plans to launch the Front Range Passenger Rail will happen in phases, starting with three round trips per day linking Denver, Westminster, Broomfield, Louisville, Boulder, Longmont, Loveland and Fort Collins. The hope is to eventually expand down south, but that will require voters to approve a new tax.

"We want to go up to 10 trains a day in a short amount of time while we're working on the south," said Joan Peck, the former mayor of Longmont, who also serves on the FRPR board. 

Peck has had a stake in bringing a train to her town for over a decade and knows the hard work and collaboration that's gone into it. 

"I've just been riding high that we're all a team, even the transportation departments within the cities are part of our teams," Peck said. "I know Longmont has been working on this for at least four or five years before it ever became this far. So, yep, they're ready to go. Longmont is ready to go."

The starter service along the Northwest Corridor is expected to cost about $333 million to launch with about a $30 million annual cost. The goal is to have the train, named CoCo, running by 2029.