Regional Transportation District directors and four state boards on Tuesday approved initial funding for a $332 million project to provide passenger rail linking Denver, Boulder and Fort Collins.

The deal with the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway would use existing freight tracks, allowing Front Range Passenger Rail “starter service” to start by January 2029. Trains would reach speeds up to 79 miles per hour on three 80-minute round-trips a day, stopping in eight cities.

State leaders’ timetable shows design work and engineering mostly completed by the end of this year, using the initial $5.8 million from RTD and $3.8 million from the Colorado Transportation Investment Office, the business enterprise arm of the Colorado Department of Transportation. RTD directors committed to support a payment of $156 million overall for the starter service, and the CTIO commissioners committed to paying $176 million — plus an additional $10 million to $12 million a year each to cover operating costs. State transportation commissioners and the Front Range Passenger Rail District board also signed off, and the Colorado Clean Transit Enterprise board approved paying an additional $10 million to $12 million a year for train operations.

BNSF owns the tracks. An agreement negotiated by Lisa Kaufmann, a senior advisor to Polis, required approvals by all five boards before it could be finalized on June 15. The deal lays out terms for track-sharing as passenger trains connect eight northern Front Range cities (Denver, Boulder, Fort Collins, Westminster, Broomfield, Longmont, Louisville, Loveland) without disrupting freight operations.

“It’s been a long time coming,” CTIO board chairman Cecil Gutierrez said. “There are many of us who have been dreaming of this for decades.”

RTD directors voted 14 to 1 to approve the initial funding and support the project after hearing from rail transit advocates, several of them referring to RTD’s failure to complete the promised FasTracks rail after collecting sales tax revenues from residents since 2005. “Supporting this will begin a long process of restoring confidence in RTD,” Colorado Passenger Rail Association president Jack Wheeler said.

FasTracks plans include a train linking Denver and Boulder.

“An objective evaluation of our future revenues and existing costs quickly reveals that we simply will never have the funds to build out the system as originally planned,” said RTD Director Patrick O’Keefe, who chairs the 15-member board. “We need to be creative and find alternatives to honor the promises made to communities across our service area,” he said, and launching the starter service in partnership with state agencies “is a very encouraging example of this creativity.”

It’s the first step toward the proposed, broader Front Range Passenger Rail system linking Fort Collins to Pueblo with 10 trains a day running a route along Interstate 25.