The Broomcorn Express, Quarterly Publication of the Friends of Broomfield History
Vol. 4, No. 2, January-March 2024
TODAY’S NEWS
You may have read the news that federal funding will help kick-start Colorado’s Front Range Passenger Rail between Fort Collins and Pueblo, a project that will bring passenger rail service to many towns along the Front Range, including Broomfield. You may also have seen the periodic references to the long-postponed extension of the RTD B line from Westminster to Broomfield, Boulder, and Longmont. We know that the renewed interest in passenger rail service as an alternative to expanding road networks is a national trend with distinct motivations and challenges at the local level.
A TRIP IN THE WAYBACK MACHINE
As some of you may remember, in The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends cartoon series, there was a recurring segment called “Peabody’s Improbable History,” in which a dog (Mr. Peabody) takes a boy (Sherman) in his time-traveling invention (the Wayback Machine) to meet various historical figures. It would certainly be useful for us local history aficionados to have access to a Wayback Machine today, which could take us back a hundred years to a Broomfield with regular passenger service to Denver via electric trolley on the Denver & Interurban (D&I) Railroad. D&I was a Colorado & Southern Railroad subsidiary and their service operated from 1904 through 1926. You could ride from Platform 11 at the Denver Union terminal to Boulder. Given the D&I Railroad’s track layout, which resembled a diamond in the north and a long-curved segment to the south leading to Denver, it was referred to as the “Kite Line” (or Kite Route). Travel from Denver to Boulder took less than an hour and cost 50 cents, with trolleys running in both directions every hour. After the first day of service, the Denver Post declared, “Boulder is now a suburb of Denver.” The Colorado Encyclopedia states that the route had about 565,000 riders per year at its peak. On the next page is a D&I trolley at the Westminster Station, circa 1908.
Undated photo of a D&I trolley car stopped at the Broomfield Depot, the Broomfield History Collection.
INTERURBAN EXPANSION IN THE EARLY 1900s
There was a proliferation of trolley lines throughout the United States in the early 1900s, following on from multiple demonstration electrified systems exhibited at the World Cotton Centennial in 1885. A reference in Wikipedia states that by 1895, almost 900 electric street railways had been built in the United States.
The same trend was happening locally in Colorado. Denver had 250 miles of track within the metropolitan area, and interurban extensions to the Golden and Boulder area had an additional 40 miles of track. According to one article on D&I history, a big driver here was the “phenomenal growth in people, businesses and small communities along the Front Range. Because roads were primitive and few people owned automobiles, any new method of transportation was received with enthusiasm.” Interurban lines, which were the systems designed to link cities with rural areas, sometimes shared facilities with passenger railroads, as was the case in Broomfield.
END OF THE LINE
Given the rapid expansion of trolley service into rural areas, you might be surprised at their short time in operation, much like that of the stagecoaches before them. By the 1920s, the growth of automobile use had significantly impacted ridership, and by the Great Depression, many of the routes had ceased to operate. A 1920 accident in Globeville with multiple fatalities may have taken the sheen off of local trolley service and impacted the operators’ financial status. The D&I ceased to be profitable in 1923, and the Kite Line service, which was discontinued at the end of 1926, was replaced by a bus service that also failed to be profitable. Local transportation activity became and is still dominated by increasing numbers of single-occupancy vehicles accessing our road infrastructure.
BACK AGAIN
At a December 14, 2023 press conference, Governor Polis said, “The fact is that Coloradans are ready for Front Range rail. I would argue we were ready five or ten years ago, but we’re certainly ready now.” Perhaps it is not so strange that the same populated places that were served by interurban trolleys a hundred years ago are back as part of the route where we might be ten years (or longer) into the future.
Sources:
- https://www.denverpost.com/2023/12/06/front-range-train-rail-colorado-bipartisan-infrastructure-law/
- https://broomfield.org/3294/Northwest-Rail
- This is personal history that I just couldn’t make up. For more details see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mister_Peabody Would certainly be useful for us to have access to the Wayback Machine to get closure on if Broomfield was named for the broomcorn crop or after James Broomfield.
- Some references put the Denver terminus at Denver Tramway’s Interurban Loop at 15th and Arapahoe Streets
- Map from the GES Gazette, March 14, 2022. See https://gesgazette.com/2022/03/14/globeville-was-once-a-hub-for-rail-travel/
- Hard to imagine being able to drive from Denver to Boulder in under an hour today. Some references state the actual travel time may have been 30 minutes longer.
- https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/broomfield-depot
- https://localhistory.boulderlibrary.org/islandora/object/islandora:69759
- https://gesgazette.com/2022/03/14/globeville-was-once-a-hub-for-rail-travel/
- Kevin Pharris’s book Riding Denver’s Rails is available from the Broomfield Public Library through the Libby online book reader
- https://gesgazette.com/2022/03/14/globeville-was-once-a-hub-for-rail-travel/
- https://www.american-rails.com/clrdointerustre.html
Featured image: Map of the D&I Kite Route