Commerce City sees FasTracks rail plans

Residents get preview of North Metro corridor

Kevin Flynn, Rocky Mountain News

Published March 21, 2007 at midnight

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COMMERCE CITY - It is a tough area to get around, a tangle of railroad tracks, roads, streams, canals and industry.

"Yes, it is a tricky area," said longtime Commerce City resident Beth Lambrecht. Still, she says, don't put a FasTracks commuter rail station "in my lap."

Lambrecht, who moved to the neighborhood north of the Suncor refinery and east of the O'Brien Canal in 1952, lives in a home surrounded by industrial properties on 64th Avenue.

Lambrecht was among the crowd that turned out at Adams City High School on Tuesday for an informational open house on the FasTracks North Metro rail corridor, a $437.7 million project that is scheduled to be moving people back and forth between Thornton and Denver by 2015.

Among the open house displays was a set of oversize aerial photos of the corridor showing a multitude of alternate commuter train pathways aimed at bypassing the busy Sand Creek Junction, a tangle of crossings for the main lines of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe and Union Pacific railroads.

A decision on the route is still up in the air. It's sessions like Tuesday's and another one this evening from 5:30 to 8 at the Northglenn Senior Center that will help planners decide.

The various proposed routes pass both east and west of Lambrecht's home. If the new tracks pass to the east of Lambrecht's home, as one route suggested by local citizens has it, there could be a station a block away.

"I think it's kind of a bad thing," Lambrecht said. "I don't want it right up in my yard. Not right here in my lap!"

Lambrecht and others at the open house leaned toward an alternative that puts the tracks slightly to the east of Sand Creek Junction and the Interstate 270 flyover. The new tracks would come into Commerce City almost halfway between Brighton Boulevard and U.S. 85 at I-270, where a little-used siding track now runs.

Because the other option takes a bypass to the west of the Suncor refinery, the eastern bypass would mean closer access for city residents to the regional transit system. It might also be less expensive than the other options.

But Joe Racosky, the consultant project manager for RTD's environmental impact study on the corridor, said the agency won't narrow the choices to a single alternative without more study.

Calvin Green, whose family has owned Green Brothers Oil Co. in northeast Denver since 1959, also likes the eastern bypass alternative.

"I like the idea that it would go up through Commerce City," he said. He'd also like to have a station near his business, a half- block from the Commerce City line.

But the closest potential station sites are south of him in the Swansea neighborhood and the one north of him is near Lam-brecht's house.

"I spent 13 years on and off in Japan while I was in the Navy and I've seen what mass transit can do," Green said.

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