More than 1 million revenue miles run since public service began. Improved on-time performance. Increased ridership year over year, with consistent gains every month in 2023 since May. Two and a half years injury free. No red signal violation since February 2021. Service availability of 98.7 percent – .2 percent better than concessionaire Denver Transit Operators.
By these measures, the team behind the N Line – the first electrified commuter rail line that RTD operates – has plenty to celebrate as the agency marks the third anniversary of the line’s historic opening amid a global pandemic. The N Line, part of RTD’s 2004 voter-approved FasTracks program to expand transit across the Denver metro region, extended rail service from Denver 13 miles north through Commerce City, Northglenn and Thornton. The remaining 5.5 miles of the corridor, reaching North Adams County, will be built as funds become available.
When the N Line team reflects on these measures, they see more than numbers. Each data point represents hard work, long days and round-the-clock coverage amid a race to staff up and properly train new engineers in time for the September 2020 opening. Talk with the line’s six dozen staff members, and each speaks openly about the dedication observed of colleagues, the teamwork, the steep learning curve the group faced. And one word repeatedly surfaces to describe how they feel about this project: pride.
Opening day
“This is the most cohesive group I’ve been a part of in all my years (of railroading), and we’ve only gotten stronger,” said Paige Gibson, the line’s general superintendent of transportation. “Everybody here owns a piece of the N Line. My team is the reason that we are successful. They are the people who make all the everyday stuff happen, and they’re really good at it.”
Gibson recalls the challenge of providing required training time to the first class of newly certified engineers in early 2020, when just one train could be used on weekdays. It wasn’t until May or June that multiple trains could be run – and on weekends, too. The N Line’s first supervisors came aboard in July. An agencywide hiring freeze in August, shortly before the line’s opening, meant that no one could join the team until the following February. And the backdrop to all of this was COVID-19, which led employees who thought they had been exposed to the virus to be granted two weeks of time off.
“I don’t know that every team would have been able to hold up under that kind of pressure,” Gibson said. “I think that speaks to the dedication and the ethics that my people have. We didn’t drop a trip for months. The team is so incredibly dedicated and so incredibly driven.” She, too, speaks to “the pride that they have in this place, because they all built it.”
N Line graduation
Phil Washington Jr., now the line’s manager of rail service delivery, was one of the first lead field supervisors to join the team. He noted that, like most people around him on this project, he previously was an entry level RTD employee, new to commuter rail – in his case, he was a light rail operator for two years. For so many N Line employees, he observed, the question was “Could we do it? Could we make something different and engage our team, our employees, our represented personnel? It was an experiment, and I think we have succeeded.”
Washington Jr. continued: “The line is very important to me – I feel like we are the caretakers. We've been tasked with operating it. We are the people that need to make sure that it's being used the way it should be, and that people are having positive experiences when they're riding it.”
Brady Holloway, general superintendent of infrastructure and maintenance of way, left Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor in April 2019 to begin building the N Line team. Trying to get a few people into previously approved positions during the pandemic was a challenge, he said. Teaching a growing workforce was exciting. Many represented employees and some supervisors were not familiar with Federal Railroad Administration standards and had to learn quickly.
N Line 1 year
Holloway pointed to the line’s minimal turnover as evidence that “commuter rail is a great place to work. People enjoy their jobs. They come here, they stay here and they're happy. When we have positions open up, they're almost always very quickly filled.”
One such employee who joined the team from within RTD was lead field supervisor Jason Jolly, a 15-year bus operator who sought the opportunity to work as a train engineer. Jolly’s father, who retired as a light rail controller, moved to rail from bus operations and told his son that the new start “was the best thing he ever did.”
Jolly was part of the first class of engineers. The hardest initial part, he joked, was “trying not to steer.” Sitting in a train, he said, you do everything with one controller in your hand.
“RTD only had one other opportunity like this, opening light rail,” Jolly said. “You very rarely start from the bottom floor and get the ability to advance yourself. And I think every one of us put in a lot of hard work. I’ve hired and helped hire other engineers that I trained, and they're now field supervisors. I think you see a part of yourself grow when you can train somebody else and they move up.”
N Line train on bridge
When the N Line division opened, the team had to learn so much, Washington Jr. added. “We made mistakes. That's OK. We had the opportunity to fail forward, and to learn from the mistakes and become better. We're proud of where we are. We are looking toward the future.” The team now understands how to run this kind of system, he said.
“The level of service that RTD has provided – and the general upkeep and maintenance that has occurred since opening – have proven that RTD is capable of operating and maintaining its own commuter rail line up to the same standards as our contractor,” Washington Jr. concluded. “This was the original gamble, so to speak: whether the agency could do it.
“Yes, we can, we have and we will continue to do so. That is our success story.”
