Where's our Ski Train?

One of my old friends holds Swiss citizenship. He's a skier and spent many of his visits to Switzerland—some of which involved compulsory military service—hitting the slopes.

While he regularly drove to the mountains, his stories involving passenger rails stood out. Instead of sitting in car traffic, he'd hop on the train to Andermatt, fighting for a ski rack position amongst a crowd of fellow skiers. Once a spot was secured, watching the scenery—and a single transfer—was the only part of the itinerary. On the way home, he kicked back, maybe drank a beer, and shot the s**t with friends.

"[Passenger rail] is as prevalent as we imagine it [in Europe],'" confirms Andrew Denning, a historian who lived in Munich, Germany, while performing research for his book, Skiing into Modernity: A Cultural and Environmental History. "There's a much longer enduring kind of skepticism in European societies of bending over backward to fit their lives to automobiles and roads."

The contrast with the U.S., particularly within skiing, is somewhat jarring. Not every day spent driving to the hill involves traffic. For some of us who ski at smaller resorts, battling crowds on the highway is something other people in more populated regions experience. But even if I've had the luxury of skiing at a mom and pop hill for the past few years, I still rely extensively on my car, as do many other skiers. Haunted by admittedly romantic visions of sipping a lager as I watched the mountains go by, I was left with one burning question: Where's our dang ski train?

In the early 1900s, the U.S. was a passenger rail superpower with 254,000 miles of tracks. Some of these rail lines contributed to the country's growing interest in skiing. Sun Valley Resort, Idaho, was opened in 1936 by Averell Harriman, Chairman of the Board of Union Pacific Railroad, who, in the hopes of navigating a Great Depression passenger rail slump, sought to marry skiing and trains by creating a glamorous ski area near one of Union Pacific's existing lines.

In the East, ski trains operated by the Boston and Maine Railroad transported skiers from urban hubs to the mountains throughout the 1930s. Colorado's Winter Park Resort partly owes its creation to a crowd of train-hopping skiers who rode through the Moffat Tunnel from Denver's Union Station to play in the snow outside the Tunnel's West Portal. Denver's Director of City Parks at the time, George Cranmer, took note of what was happening at the West Portal and, after some stubborn financial maneuvering, spearheaded the opening of Winter Park there in 1940.

For all this train action, though, Jesse Ritner, a historian who studied the ski industry while writing his dissertation, cautions against the idea that, at one point, gobs of skiers rode railways into the mountains. "The number of people you're thinking about skiing on these trains is actually pretty small, and part of that is because ski trains are actually not all that successful of a solution, in the end, for train companies that are trying to make up for lost transportation to cars," says Ritner.

In the case of Winter Park's original train hoppers, "these were the affluent, you know, politically powerful folks in Denver who could get a train to stop at no train stop," says Michael Childers, historian and author of Colorado Powder Keg: Ski Resorts and the Environmental Movement.

Cars—and eventually planes—were, indeed, beating out the trains. By 1910, over 468,000 motor vehicles had been registered in the U.S., freeing thousands of travelers from rigid railroad schedules. Four years later, the world's first regularly scheduled airline took flight in St. Petersburg, Florida. When President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, which poured $25 billion into creating a national network of American highways, the writing was officially on the wall.

"The interstate gave people the opportunity to use their cars to make journeys fairly easily. And the airlines with jet engines enabled them to make journeys much quicker," says Nick Little, director of railway education at the Center for Railway Research and Education. As the years passed, many privately operated passenger rail lines became more and more financially untenable with the rise of roads and planes.

In 1970, the U.S. government nixed a pre-existing obligation that private rail companies continue running passenger trains and established the National Railroad Passenger Corporation—now called Amtrak—a government-owned passenger rail company.

"Freight railroads could concentrate on freight, which is really very important for the nation's economy. And the passenger burden would be met by Amtrak," says Little. "That's really quite fair because not everybody can afford to fly. Not everybody can afford to have their own car, but people might still need to move around the country for various personal reasons."

While cars and planes dominate today, some parts of the U.S. do have passenger rail service semi-comparable to Europe, like the Northeast corridor, where Amtrak makes the bulk of its money.

"Passenger transportation in general, whether it's by bus, train, or any other surface means, is much more efficient and much more available, where you have a higher density of population," says Little. Switzerland and other small European countries have this advantage in spades. The U.S., in comparison, is much larger, with isolated pockets of human density—think California, parts of Texas, and Florida—that have passenger rail potential, whereas coast-to-coast trains don’t make much sense.

Even if passenger rail is generally diminished across the U.S., ski trains—or skiing adjacent trains—still exist. Amtrak's California Zephyr line transports travelers from the Bay Area to Truckee, California, which would-be skiers could use as a snowsports vacation landing pad, provided they have a plan to reach nearby Lake Tahoe ski resorts.

Another Amtrak-operated line—the Winter Park Express—is European-esque, depositing Denver skiers at a station about 100 yards from Winter Park's lifts. The number of skiers and snowboarders carried by the Winter Park Express is impressive but relatively small. In 2022, the train transported 16,000 riders, far less than the millions of guests Colorado's ski resorts host each season.

Efforts are underway to expand the state's passenger rail system. Colorado’s Governor, Jared Polis, told reporters earlier this year that he hopes to improve the Winter Park Express with year-round service (the train is slated to run between January and March in 2025), increase the number of daily trips, and reduce its cost, alongside adding stops in western Jefferson County and at Eldora Mountain.

Other initiatives nationwide show a reignited interest in passenger rail. Brightline, the only privately owned and operated intercity passenger rail company in the U.S., aims to build and open a bullet train route connecting Las Vegas and Los Angeles by 2028. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law directed $66 billion toward new rail projects across the country. In a release, the Biden administration touted the Law as "the largest investment in passenger rail since the creation of Amtrak."

This battle is uphill, though. Many European countries consistently invest in passenger trains and railways. These efforts aren't typically moneymakers. Instead, Pasi Lautala, the director of Michigan Tech University's Rail Transportation Program, says they exist to ensure people have access to a "public service" that provides "mobility for every social class." The U.S., in contrast, is behind. "We have a mode that we, from a passenger perspective, we pretty much neglected for the last 50 or 60 years," Lautala explains. "If you start investing in something now, it's not that easy."

Constructing new passenger railroads in the mountains complicates matters further. "You've got to build tunnels, and things like that, and the track has to have a lot more curvature to climb the grades," says Little, the director of railway education. "It winds up being more expensive."

Lautala speculates that Brightline's involvement in passenger rail could create headway but acknowledges that it's too early to say what the future holds. "If you get the private equity to see that, 'Hey, there might be a return on investment on passenger rail, then things can move very quickly,'" he says. "If they invest a lot of money, they want to get a return on the investment ASAP."

Little says, "I think we could do more than we currently do" regarding expanding passenger rail infrastructure, but he doesn't believe "we could ever go back to it being a major part of the way to move people across the country."

The allure of passenger trains is obvious for skiers. They don't get stuck in traffic like cars and contribute less carbon, helping tamp down the often unavoidable irony of creating greenhouse gasses in our collective pursuit of winter. But we have a long way to go before my dream of living a Swiss fantasy is realized, and, at this point, skiers might be better served by other transportation alternatives.

The Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT) decided—not without controversy—that a gondola was the best way to address ski traffic in Little Cottonwood Canyon instead of a cog rail.

Writing about Colorado's I-70 for Outside, Gloria Liu noted that, according to some experts, the aforementioned issue of population density and a "long-held commitment to automobile infrastructure make fixed forms of mass transit, like high-speed rail, impractical" throughout much of the U.S. and that buses and vans, while less exciting than trains, are better options.

Something Lautala said during our conversation when asked about riding trains in his home country, Finland, struck me. "It's part of your life. It's part of everybody's life," he explained. "It's not something special or unique."

Lautala's assessment contrasted with my quaint visions of riding the train, lager and skis in hand. These are enormous infrastructural projects with decades of history behind them that, if nurtured, become interwoven into a society's fabric. Writing a different version of our national story—one that involves trains zigzagging through the mountains—is a complicated matter of unfeeling practicality, not a flighty romance you pine for while tangling with powder day traffic.

Related: James Niehues and Rad Smith on The Future of Hand-Painted Ski Maps