Senator Jon Tester (D-MT) and this blog follow each other on Twitter. As rail coal traffic dies Tester wants to restore the North Coast Hiawatha line after Amtrak ended service in 1979 or about the time an interested party moved to Missoula from Deadwood.
But Missoula County Commissioner Dave Strohmaier is continuing his decade-long pursuit of bringing rail service back to the southern portion of the state, this time by forging a coalition of counties interested in seeing the locomotives pass through their areas of the state once again. The rail line Strohmaier is focused on would connect Missoula, Helena, Bozeman, Livingston and Billings to other lines leading to major hubs like Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis and Chicago. [The Missoulian]Two congressional neighbors now newly elected Democratic governors in Colorado and New Mexico have been pledging to develop passenger rail along the Front Range and southern Rockies.
The poll found 85 percent of people supported the use of passenger rail on the Front Range, with 88 percent of northern Front Range respondents supporting the idea. Some members of the Southwest Chief & Front Range Passenger Rail Commission would like to see it put on the ballot next year, an accelerated timeline for the plan. CDOT just hired a contractor to look into key questions about the project's feasibility, including which preexisting rail lines the train would use and who would oversee it. [Colorado Public Radio]Amtrak struggled with service on the Empire Builder through Montana during the Bakken boom and still suffers congestion through North Dakota. Douglas and Gillette, Wyoming continue to kill people and strangle traffic so passenger rail would bring some order to that chaos. Meanwhile the Trump Organization and the Koch Brothers are pledging to kill passenger rail service while vehicle traffic between the Black Hills, Cheyenne and Denver continues to increase just like it is between Denver, Albuquerque and Santa Fe. Many get the idea of a future I-25E but now is the time to connect the Southwest Chief to the Empire Builder at Shelby, Montana through Denver, Cheyenne and Gillette, too. It would intersect with the North Coast Hiawatha line at Laurel, Montana.
Like the former Burlington Northern Santa Fe rail bed from Edgemont, South Dakota to Deadwood has become the Mickelson Trail the former southern Montana right of way is home to the Route of the Hiawatha Trail.
There are 43,560 sq.ft./acre; a 50 ft. x one mile railroad right of way is 264,000 square feet or about 6 acres; the Santa Fe Southern Railway is 18.1 miles long or around 110 acres. How expensive could it be?
Imagine a time when portions or all track is elevated for wildlife egress through a future corridor between El Paso, Texas, the Canadian River in New Mexico and the Amtrak station in Shelby then on to the Yukon River in Alaska intersecting with a tunnel under the Bering Strait connecting South and North America to Russia and the rest of Eurasia.
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"State and local officials have applied for a federal grant to study what it would take to establish a new branch of the Southwest Chief with stops in Pueblo and Colorado Springs." Colorado Springs Gazette
“The Empire Builder, for example, provides $327 million annually to the economies of the states it serves while the Southwest Chief brings Colorado, Kansas and New Mexico $180 million annually.” Rail organization president testifies that Amtrak fuels economy
"Unlike past studies, this one would focus on the potential economic benefits to communities poised along the route. The route, which last provided regular rail service in the 1970s, crosses 18 Montana counties and touches the state’s most populated cities along with dozens of rural towns. Strohmaier confirmed Tuesday that a regional rail summit will take place in Missoula on April 17. The CEO of the Rail Passengers Association is slated to attend from Washington, D.C." [Effort to launch regional rail authority, southern route, gains momentum]
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