Front Range Passenger Rail stars in a new student documentary — despite not yet existing ...Middle East

In April, when the Trump administration started threatening to cut millions in funding to Harvard and Columbia universities, it felt like Ivy League schools were at the center of a universe around which all other higher learning institutions must orbit. 

But far, far away from those Northeast schools, on the Larimer campus of Front Range Community College in Fort Collins, a group of students were wrapping up an epic project. 

On April 22, before a crowd of 50, they revealed the final installment of a three-part docuseries they’d created about the hotly contested Front Range Passenger Rail train, which, if completed, will run the length of the state, north to south, by the end of the decade and cost up to $3.5 billion. 

The film creators were all student members of The Front Page, their school’s independent newspaper, but Morgan Treat, Julian Hanes, Catherine Schadegg, Jacob Brown and Victoria Flores had minimal experience making documentaries. 

“What we did have were ideas,” Flores wrote in The Front Page. 

Wouldn’t it be cool, they thought, to spend their summer reporting and filming a documentary about one of Colorado’s thorniest transportation topics.   

They could have made some calls, talked to some politicians and parroted what they read on the Front Range Passenger Rail website. But they wanted to report their project Vox- or HBO-documentary style, by riding public transportation buses that travel the route the proposed train will and talking to riders, policymakers and government officials.  

That’s what they did, and as journalistic projects sometimes do, theirs arrived at an auspicious moment.  

On April 24, U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert called on the federal Department of Government Efficiency and the U.S. Department of Transportation to evaluate “potentially billions” in federal taxpayer funding for the project, saying her constituents don’t want to pay for something that “will harm our community’s quality of life and … not benefit most Coloradans.” 

But the filmmakers heard a different take during a trip that started at 6 a.m. in Fort Collins, traced the proposed route for 180 miles to Pueblo and looped back 16 hours later.  

“Most commuters I interviewed said they would vote for this project and see a need for it,” said Hanes, lead writer on the documentary. “A few were passive: happy taking the bus.” The only critic they spoke to was William Karspeck, mayor of Berthoud, who worried that if the train came by Berthoud but didn’t stop, his constituents would pay for “nothing but noise.” 

Hanes said the timing aligned such that they didn’t think to invite Boebert to the watch party.  

But even if she never sees the series, John Young, a working journalist and instructor at Front Range who developed the school’s three journalism classes and advises on The Front Page, said that in diving into the project, his students “embodied” a couple of the core tenets he tries to impart to them about journalism: 

“It’s transformative. Doing it changes you. You end up meeting people you would never meet, probing into things you would never investigate” and becoming better, more sophisticated consumers of media, “which is something to celebrate.”

Discovering the rail 

Hanes said he wouldn’t have known about the passenger rail if Treat, The Front Page’s associate editor and visionary behind the project, hadn’t told the group about it.  

Like most of the docu-crew, Treat didn’t come to Front Range College to study journalism. A web design major, she joined the paper through a work-study opportunity. It wasn’t until later that she heard about Young’s Introduction to Mass Media class. After taking it and his News Writing class, she “got religion about the craft of journalism,” as Young puts it, and fell in love with “the investigative stuff,” she said.   

The rail story caught her eye because after high school she spent some time in Tbilisi, capital of Georgia, where she experienced “what public transportation can be, even in a country that definitely isn’t First World,” she said. 

She rarely uses Colorado’s public transportation, because she has a car and the places she visits don’t have bus routes, she said. She does take the occasional bus from Fort Collins to Denver, but she wanted to dig into the issue because “I’m for public transportation, but I’m not currently using it. So what would it take for me to use it?”

Hanes graduated from high school in 2020, moved into a minivan, traveled the country for a year and decided to become an author. He spent some time writing poems and short stories, “realized that wouldn’t cut it for a career just yet,” and decided to pursue journalism, enrolling at Front Range Community College.

Young says community colleges and small schools like Fort Lewis College in Durango are a perfect place to do this because students can “establish themselves, do something, try leadership roles and then keep moving up. And journalism is really about doing the thing. It’s not about a certain program. Because (many bigger schools) have programs, but are you going to shine in a massive group?” 

The documentary 

Part one of the passenger rail series focuses on the basics: What’s the project and who would use it? 

For answers the crew turned to Andy Karsian, then general manager of the Front Range Passenger Rail Board, and Nancy Burke, director of communications and outreach. 

With costs projected at roughly $3.2 billion, the rail is being pitched as a long-term solution to traffic congestion and pollution across one of Colorado’s fastest-growing regions. 

It would use existing freight corridors to hit stops in nine communities from Fort Collins to Pueblo. In the documentary, Karsian bills it as “a new way of connecting business, commerce, higher education, students, military” not only from station to station but to existing transit services. The goal is to create a more “holistic” way of connecting people throughout the region.   

Midway through the episode, the word “FACT CHECKED” spiral across the screen, indicating the journalists have done their due diligence.

But they wanted to learn “what the actual riders of Colorado’s public transportation felt about what we have and what we may build,” so at the RTD transfer station in Boulder they hopped off FLEX and onto RTD, headed for Denver. 

On their journey, they interview RTD riders, who “seem to be pretty big fans of how things are now,” Brown says.  

It was harder to get a consensus on the proposed passenger rail and who would fund it. 

A man who heard about it on YouTube liked the idea, but didn’t know enough about costs or taxpayer’s involvement to comment on that aspect. Another liked the idea but felt RTD buses would always be safer than rail, based on his experiences on the RTD Light Rail into Denver. The passenger rail would be nice for his wife who commutes from Fort Collins to Denver, he said, but the bus is safer “because the driver is right there, and he’s checking all the fares.”

And the driver shared a touching story about a woman who studied for her PhD thesis while riding his Anschutz Campus route. She asked to take his picture when it was time to defend her thesis, because she wanted to show the person who allowed her to study while he drove – and drew angel wings behind him on the picture. 

Becoming better storytellers

In episode two, the crew is visibly more comfortable and the storytelling gets better. 

The episode explores the logistics of what it takes to put people on trains and trains on tracks while entertaining viewers with hijinx.  

In the opening scene, Brown walks down a set of railroad tracks reading from a script. But just as he’s about to impart some passenger rail wisdom, Hanes leaps into the frame. While Brown stumbles around acting bewildered, Hanes dives into passenger rail funding and planning.  

In 2026, he says, anyone living along the passenger rail district will have the option to vote for a sales tax to help fund the project. That proposed 0.2% sales tax increase, says KUNC politics reporter Lucas Brady Woods, would hit the 13 counties along the I-25 corridor. And in those counties, there has been strong support for the sales tax measure, he says. 

A timeline for the rail’s creation is shakier, even though Karsian says Colorado is “ahead of most of 60 new corridors nationwide that are trying to take advantage of (Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act) dollars.”

Colorado is also ahead of planning, he noted. “But while that’s great, it’s also a challenge.” With significant funding still needed and stipulations on the federal, state and local level creating complexities, it will take years to navigate. 

Making it click 

By the time episode three rolls around, the creators are on a roll, too. The jokes are smarter and funnier, the hosts are more polished, and the graphics are better. When Hanes first appears, he’s wearing a crisp, blue oxford and his normally unruly hair is slicked back. Brown’s narration is stronger, while his jokes are intact. 

This episode explores whether the passenger rail can succeed where past projects like Denver’s FasTracks and California’s high-speed rail have struggled. It also examines the promises, pitfalls and realities behind building rail infrastructure in America. And it digs into safety, with on-the-ground reporting, as the crew makes the last leg of their journey, from Colorado Springs to Pueblo. 

“Safety is often forgotten when discussing how great it would be to have a train,” Brown says as the episode segues to the topic.  

“And the Colorado Springs South Tejon Station is one of the most egregious offenders of comfort and pedestrian safety for commuters,” he notes. Traffic is “immense” at the stop on I-25 and Tejon Street, he says. There are no benches or bathrooms but homeless encampments flank both sides of the bus station, he adds. And “notably, Bustang pulled out of the station” leaving behind a Greyhound bus that couldn’t relocate to “the max capacity” downtown Colorado Springs station.  

“But we were there,” documenting the story, he says.  

And isn’t that the point? 

To watch the documentary, start here.

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