Rocky Mountain Railtours is advertising a new route for their luxury cruise train, the Rockies to the Red Rocks route. This route, slated to start a late and abbreviated season in August 2021, will see the train start in Denver, Colorado and proceed west through the Rocky Mountains to Moab, Utah with an overnight stop in Glenwood Springs, Colorado.
This train will proceed on Union Pacific tracks, probably starting at Denver’s Union Station and taking UP’s Moffat Tunnel subdivision to Bond, where it will switch to the Glenwood Springs subdivision to Grand Junction, then the Green River subdivision to… it’s hard to know where they will stop. There is a station in Green River, just past Crescent Junction where a short subdivision goes past Moab to a potash mine. I asked RMR on Twitter and they said the start and end locations have yet to be determined.
This route is also traversed by Amtrak’s California Zephyr between Chicago and Emeryville (San Francisco). Of course, Amtrak’s schedule does the 379 mile Denver-Green River segment in just under 10 hours, while the Rocky Mountaineer will take two days to make the same journey, in a more leisurely fashion.
SilverLeaf and SilverLeaf Plus service will be offered on this route.
For more information, visit their Rockies to the Red Rocks page.
Personally I think it’s a good idea for them to branch out beyond the Vancouver-Banff and Vancouver-Jasper routes. The global pandemic has clearly taught RMR that being Canada-only is an impediment. There used to be a Seattle-Vancouver route but I believe 2018 was the last year for that.
Other Rocky Mountaineer related posts
- The Rocky Mountaineer (2010)
- A Rocky Mountaineer Evening and One Last Rocky (2015)
- Passing a Half Century (2017)
