Let’s give due credit to the well-oiled PR machine that is toiling to create enough buzz around the promised Front Range Passenger Rail project to snooker voters in 31 Colorado cities into approving a 0.33% sales tax.

Orchestrated by the usual army of consultants, barrages of news releases have been advancing a succession of community meetings to pitch the scheme to enthusiasts. The most recent “roundtable discussion” was in Colorado Springs on Saturday.

Then there are the influencers hired by the Front Range Passenger Rail District — as revealed in recent news reports — to tout the envisioned train service via a social media blitz.

What might be the masterstroke, though, was looping the public into a naming contest for the choo-choo last summer. The people’s choice? It’s a cutie: “CoCo,” short for Colorado Connector.

How’s that for humanizing a diesel smoke-belching hulk lumbering down the old Santa Fe line at about 50 or 60 mph, tops, as it competes for track with the likes of coal trains?

OK, so it’s not exactly one of those high-speed, magnetically levitated bullet trains you see in Europe or Japan. But, hey, it’s got personality, right?

Only, it’ll never work — because it serves no practical purpose. Foremost, it will have no impact on what should be its No. 1 priority, alleviating traffic on I-25.

It’ll take longer for CoCo to get from Colorado Springs to Denver than it would by car. And that’s without accounting for getting to and from a CoCo station on either end.

So, real commuters won’t ride it. Who will? Train buffs might. The route isn’t scenic enough to attract many lookie-loos.

No mass-transit project of such scale could be expected to recover its costs, but given its dim prospects for ridership, this one won’t even come close.

If fare-paying passengers can’t float this $4.7 billion white elephant on rails, who will?

The taxpayer.

About $332 million in public funding already has been sunk into CoCo by the Colorado Department of Transportation and Denver’s Regional Transportation District — without being put to a single public vote. And that’s just seed money.

Hence, the $295 million-a-year sales tax hike. And that’s before the inevitable “cost overruns” that vex all epic public transit projects. It’s also before the project runs out of money partway through — they always do — and politicians come back for more, hat in hand.

As The Gazette has reported, the tax hike will appear on the Nov. 3 ballot in cities that theoretically will be served by the train, from Trinidad to Fort Collins. But a starter service at first will run only between Denver and Fort Collins beginning in 2029. It won’t expand south to Colorado Springs and Pueblo until 2032. If then.

It’s worth noting Regional Transportation District voters in Boulder are still waiting for light-rail service — more than 20 years after it was promised as part of an RTD tax hike on the 2004 ballot.

Which means especially places such as Colorado Springs and Pueblo would be getting shortchanged from the start, paying years in advance for service that may never materialize.

It’s so costly with so little evident return on investment, it’s hard to believe even its true believers really believe in it. Maybe it’s not even a boondoggle, but a pipe dream. Let’s hope so.

Dreamers gotta dream. But let them do so without our tax dollars — even more of our tax dollars, that is. Just say no to a tax hike for CoCo.

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