If voters approve a sales-tax ballot measure later this year to fund the Colorado Connector passenger rail service, two daily round trips would be offered along the full 190-mile route from Pueblo to Fort Collins within five years, according to a plan unveiled by state officials Monday.

That intermediate phase would follow a “starter service” between Fort Collins and Denver, which is still on track to launch by 2029 — with or without the additional tax revenue. Service would be gradually expanded in future years to reach 10 daily round trips on the northern segment and eight on the southern segment, along with potential line extensions to Trinidad, New Mexico and Wyoming.

Sal Pace, the Front Range Passenger Rail District’s general manager and a former state lawmaker from Pueblo, said the state’s successful expansion of the Winter Park Express and the Bustang intercity bus service shows that the Interstate 25 corridor is ripe for a new travel option.

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“In Colorado, we have a unique situation where we don’t have real redundancy going north-south — I-25 is a bottleneck,” Pace said. “In all the anecdotal (data) and in the ridership projections, we’ve seen that it’s going to be well-used. We expect the trains to be full.”

After its boundaries were narrowed by lawmakers earlier this year, the FRPR district now spans roughly 30 municipalities along the Front Range in proximity to one of the service’s planned stations.

The district’s board of directors is set to vote at the end of August to refer a 0.333% sales tax hike to the November ballot to voters in those municipalities, which would raise about $295 million annually and cover the construction and operating costs for the full Pueblo-to-Fort-Collins service plan.

The Legislature created the rail district in 2021 to oversee passenger rail’s long-awaited return to the Front Range. Aside from several stops on long-haul Amtrak routes, Colorado hasn’t had regular intercity passenger rail service since the 1970s, but in addition to Colorado Connector and the Winter Park Express, the state is also planning to launch a “Mountain Rail” service between Denver and Granby by the end of this year, with future expansion planned as far as Steamboat Springs.

The Colorado Connector would serve 12 planned permanent stops in Fort Collins, Loveland, Longmont, Boulder, Louisville, Broomfield, Westminster, Denver, Littleton, Sterling Ranch, Colorado Springs and Pueblo.

The service plan envisions special-event stops at the Broncos’ future home at Burnham Yards and the planned Denver Summit soccer stadium at I-25 and Broadway. In surveys, the vast majority of prospective riders said they would want to use the service to travel to concerts, sporting events, outdoor recreation and other day trips, rather than for work or school.

“We are not building a commuter rail service,” Pace emphasized. “What we’re talking about is connecting people between metropolitan areas for major sporting events, for weekends visiting a grandkid at college, for going to a musical for the evening in Denver.”

Pace also said the FRPR’s “entire model has been done differently” from the Regional Transportation District’s 2004 FasTracks plan, which included the Denver-area transit agency’s long-delayed B Line to Boulder. The scheduled completion of the B Line was pushed back decades in large part due to the unexpectedly high costs of leasing the tracks along the route from freight rail giant BNSF.

“RTD didn’t even start talking to the freight railroads until after they passed FasTracks,” Pace said. “Quite to the contrary, not only do we have a signed term sheet, but we have a proposed financing model with a rail access agreement with BNSF, where they are going to be receiving 50% greater annual access fees for the passenger service meeting on-time metrics.”

“That means that BNSF is becoming a partner in this,” he added. “They are serving as a collaborator with the state and with the district in delivering service.”