WINTER PARK, Colo. — Tickets are on sale for the return of Amtrak’s Winter Park Express, the seasonal ski-train service between Denver Union Station and the Winter Park Resort that launches on Jan. 13, 2023.
Service will be offered Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays beginning the weekend of Jan. 13-15 and continuing through the weekend of March 24-26, for a total of 33 round trips. The train departs Denver at 7 a.m. and arrives at Winter Park at 9 a.m., with the return trip departing Winter Park at 4:30 p.m. and arriving in Denver at 6:40 p.m.
Tickets are available at the Winter Park Express page at the Amtrak website or on the Amtrak app, with one-way fares starting at $34 ($17 for children ages 2-12). Tickets for groups of up to eight are also available at the website or on the app. Groups of nine to 14 should call Amtrak’s reservation number, 800-USA-RAIL, while groups of 15 or more should use the Group Travel Request at the Amtrak website. More information about group travel is available at 800-USA-1GRP or by email at GroupSales@Amtrak.com.
Lift tickets, other passes, and more information about the Winter Park Resort can be obtained at the resort website.
After a one-time trial in 2015, Amtrak launched the Winter Park Express in 2017. It is a successor to the ski train run by the Denver & Rio Grande Western from 1940 to 1988, and a private operator until 2009. Service expanded to every Friday in 2020, prior to the suspension of operations because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
With cancelled trains, truncated consists, just where is the equipment coming from?
I agree. Where can they find equipment when they can run all train schedules now? Pi$$ poor management if you can call it that
can’t
John, they used to operate a Reno Ski train that also stopped in Truckee. It departed Oakland on Fridays and returned from Reno on Sundays. However, passengers needed to make arrangement to the travel from the depots to the resorts (or their cabins) and to the ski lifts.
With the Superliner equipment shortage, how many coaches will be taken away from the long distance trains for this temporary corridor service?
Back a number of years ago a group tried to run a ski train on the St. Lawrence and Atlantic RR from the old Grand Trunk yard just north of downtown Portland, Maine to the Sunday River ski area in Bethel. For a very short while it was a successful operation but eventually it fell apart because the train brought skiers to downtown Bethel and not the slopes. You had to transfer your skies and yourself by bus to the slopes. Skiers want to ski and not sit on busses and trains. The transfer operation in both directions and the inevitable delays on the train resulted in reduced loadings and it eventually just became a baby-sitting operation for parents who dropped their kids off at the train in the morning and picked them up in the evening. Ski trains need to have direct access to the slopes in order to survive. This operation lasted only one or two seasons at most.
Surely there has got to be other markets similar to this that Amtrak can go after?
Not just ski trains but other holiday destinations?