Union station once again is a hub for rail connections.

• Author: Best, Allen
• Position: TRANSPORTATION

DENVER'S STATELY UNION STATION lost its crucial relevance in Colorado decades ago. The coal and other freight trains kept rolling by, at least 18 to 24 a day, and Amtrak slid in and out, morning and night. But the union was a misnomer, the grand station mostly historical relic.

Now the station is becoming a union once again. Light-rail trains from the south metropolitan converge, to be joined in 2016 by commuter trains from Denver International Airport, the Gold line to Arvada and Wheat Ridge, and the hub of an eventual rail line to Boulder and Longmont. They will be joined by buses.

Will Union Station someday also connect high-speed trains along the Colorado's 1-25 and 1-70 corridors?

"I really don't know," says Mark Imhoff, director of the Division of Transit and Rail, a new agency within the Colorado Department of Transportation. Imhoff does hope that several studies being launched by his division will deliver answers to that and other questions.

C-DOT has spent tens of millions of dollars during the last decade studying 1-70 west from Denver to the Eagle Valley. Under the auspices of the Rocky Mountain Rail Authority, it also has studied potential for high-speed rail along both the 1-70 and 1-25 corridors. Where these studies left dangling questions is where the new studies will start.

The 1-70 study, for example, specified improvements to increase capacity of the existing highway, with an estimated cost of $8 billion. It also articulated a 50-year vision of what it generically called an automated guideway system, or AGS. The document favored no particular technology, but said that whatever the technology, it must move people more rapidly than cars. One common threshold in defining high-speed rail is 120 mph.

How real is any of this? Former Gov. Bill Owens in 2001 dismissed the vision of a 1-70 monorail as a "Disneyland ride." Withits upcoming S2 million study of technology for high-speed rail along 1-25 and 1-70 corridors, C-DOT dismisses very little.

Still, much remains to be proven. For example, one type of technology identified in the 1-70 study, magnetic levitation, works wonderfully on test tracks that arc flat and straight. Two commercial applications of the technology exist, one being in Shanghai, where a mag-lev train rockets 19 miles at maximum speeds of 268 mph.

But will mag-lev--or other types of high-speed technology--work on the grades from Georgetown to the Continental Divide or, for that matter, across the Palmer Divide?

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