When the state of Colorado bought Burnham Yard in 2021, it had big plans for the old railyard south of downtown Denver. The state expected the roughly 60-acre site could accommodate the expansion of Interstate 25, new RTD light rail tracks, and even the planned Front Range passenger rail line.
"This is one of those once-in-a-lifetime opportunities,” a high-ranking state transportation official said then.
Fifty million dollars later, state transportation officials say they don’t actually need most of the land and are preparing it for sale.
“[The state’s] focus in the next year-and-a-half is making sure that we're doing everything we can out there to get the property to a point where we can make it viable for sale,” Piper Darlington, director of the Colorado Transportation Investment Office, which is managing Burnham Yard, told the state Transportation Commission last week.
The state originally bought the site from the Union Pacific Railroad. The city of Denver would like to see it redeveloped into a neighborhood, a process that would take years.
The state does have smaller plans for the area, which is shaped like a banana and dotted with aging historic railroad buildings. Even if they sell it, the government could still get permission to use parts of the yard in the future.
Obtaining an easement could allow the state to move an existing freight rail line on the site, eliminating three grade crossings. The easement could also “reserve opportunity for transit opportunities in the future,” said Colorado Department of Transportation spokesperson Tim Hoover.
“But nothing has been determined yet," he wrote in an email.
Beyond that, it appears the property won’t be used for transportation projects.
Initially, planners thought they might move existing freight rail tracks from next to I-25 and into Burnham Yard to make room for a wider freeway.
But the proposed I-25 expansion has since been dropped. And a recent study concluded that moving the freight tracks would create noise and vibration issues for the nearby La Alma-Lincoln Park neighborhood.
The freight tracks, known as the “consolidated main line,” should be left where they are, the study said. Meanwhile, Front Range passenger rail will likely use the existing consolidated main line, rather than running through Burnham Yard.
“We learned it was probably a lot more complex and expensive to make it usable for Front Range passenger rail than we initially thought,” Darlington said.
It looks like RTD is dropping its Burnham Yard project, too.
RTD officials had long planned to add light rail tracks between its I-25 and Broadway station and Colfax Avenue, where trains used to run every 90 seconds at peak times.
Burnham Yard land would have helped make that expansion possible, alleviating a once-challenging operational bottleneck. RTD’s 2023 budget contained $6.9 million to buy the land it needed from the state.
But, in light of service cuts and low ridership demand since the pandemic, it appears that RTD recently decided it no longer needs more tracks there.
“A reduction in forecast ridership and a spreading of that ridership demand over longer AM and PM peak times resulted in RTD determining that the additional tracks will not be needed in the future,” the state’s report said.
Asked to confirm that decision and explain it, RTD officials said they don’t have any post-pandemic ridership forecasts or studies to reference in order to make a “data-driven decision” about track expansion at Burnham Yard.
“... RTD cannot commit to this purchase without an established plan. Discussions with the State of Colorado are on-going,” RTD spokesperson Marta Sipeki wrote.
Transit advocates say canceling Burnham Yard plans is a mistake.
RTD could still benefit from Burnham Yard, assuming the state manages to get an easement and relocate an existing freight rail line away from RTD’s light rail tracks on the east side of the yard.
Regardless, transit advocates slammed RTD’s move and called it a “massive mistake.”
“RTD across the board is failing to plan for the transit system we're going to need if you want to get people out of cars," said Richard Bamber with Greater Denver Transit.
Just last week, Gov. Jared Polis announced a new goal of nearly doubling transit service across the state over the next decade. Giving up the opportunity now to expand the system later could prove short-sighted, Bamber said.
His organization is pushing for the conversion of RTD’s D light rail line that runs adjacent to Burnham Yard to heavy commuter rail so it could share tracks with Front Range passenger rail someday.
That would solve a big problem for Front Range rail planners: how to access downtown Denver from the south. Tracks to the south were removed when Union Station was redeveloped more than a decade ago, Bamber said.
“We've been making these mistakes,” Bamber said. “And sadly, this report means we're going to go on making more of these mistakes.”
So if it won’t be used much for transportation, was the $50 million Burnham Yard purchase a mistake?
“No,” said Hoover, the CDOT spokesperson.
“The purchase of the site preserved our transportation options for multiple important transit systems and provided the opportunity to study the optimal consolidated mainline track alignments,” he wrote in an email. “We anticipate that we will be able to recoup the investment made once we have completed the site due diligence.”
Beyond the $50 million purchase price, Hoover said the state has spent $3.6 million on it for security, emergency repairs, and the track alignment study.
City planners, meanwhile, are working to guide the eventual redevelopment of the site. Ryan Huff, a spokesperson for Denver’s Community Planning and Development department, said the city’s effort will start in earnest in 2025.
“Like other plans, this effort will create a long-term vision for the neighborhood that guides future development to reflect the community’s vision of a livable, healthy, walkable, sustainable and vibrant area,” Huff wrote in an email.
