LOUISVILLE — The vision is bold.

Sixteen stations between Longmont and Denver, 45-minute express service from end to end for a $12.50 ticket, 64,000 passengers a day, battery-powered rail cars juiced off renewable energy sources.

But Rocky Mountain Rail’s pitch to launch a $1.1 billion rail line in the metro area’s northwest quadrant that the Regional Transportation District thus far has been unable to build — and doesn’t expect to complete for another 30 years without new funding — isn’t a slam dunk.

Certainly not with residents and local government officials who showed up for a presentation on the plan this week at the Louisville Public Library.

“You guys are nuts,” said Susan Loo, who stepped down in November after two terms on the Louisville City Council. “But I do think your value is to drive the conversation with RTD a little faster than it’s going.”

Residents along the U.S. 36 corridor have long complained that as rail corridors have been added throughout the metro area as the result of a 2004 FasTracks election in which voters agreed to tax themselves to pay for transit improvements, their train line has run into daunting financial challenges that see little prospect of a near-term resolution.

Over the last 15 years, residents of Boulder County have paid approximately $250 million through that sales tax and have only the Flation Flyer bus service to show for it. RTD only built out 6 miles of the northwest rail line in 2016 — the B-Line to Westminster — saying it didn’t have the money to go all the way to Longmont.

Loo said Rocky Mountain Rail’s goal of keeping the operating cost of the Longmont-to-Denver line at $5 a mile is unrealistic. Others in the room also questioned how the Westminster-based company would be able to keep expenses so low.

“We’re focused on that number like crazy,” Dave Ruble, chief engineer for Rocky Mountain Rail, said of the proposed $5 per mile outlay. “We’re going to give you service that’s better than a car.”

The company made an unsolicited offer last fall to RTD to build the northwest rail line by 2025. It proposes floating revenue bonds to pay for the project and also collecting millions in one-time “station access fees” — ranging from $7.5 million to $34 million per station — charged to both RTD and local governments in the corridor.

RTD spokeswoman Pauletta Tonilas said the agency has asked Rocky Mountain Rail to provide more information about its proposal before it makes any decisions.

“We are open to any ideas out there that can build out transit,” she said. “We don’t have that funding now or in the near future.”

Short of a new tax or other revenue source, RTD has said it could establish peak rush-hour rail service in the northwest corridor by 2042 at a cost of $700 to $800 million. Full service, at a cost of $1.5 billion, wouldn’t come about until 2050.

Unsolicited offers are not a foreign concept for RTD, Tonilas said. Both the N-Line, which is under construction, and the R-Line, which opened in Aurora in 2017, were the result of unsolicited offers from the private sector.

But Ruble, who had a 30-year career with the Colorado Department of Transportation, admits that the biggest hurdle on the northwest line is BNSF.

The giant railroad company owns the corridor between Denver and Longmont and moves freight on it every day. For years, RTD has tried — unsuccessfully so far — to negotiate a track-sharing arrangement with BNSF to run passenger trains between the cities.

Rocky Mountain Rail wants to avoid that type of deal with BNSF by paying the railroad company to move its operations out of the corridor altogether and building its own set of double tracks to allow for frequent and speedy passenger rail runs between Denver and Boulder County.

“We want to get them out of the corridor,” Ruble said of BNSF.

Rocky Mountain Rail estimates that migrating BNSF to another corridor could cost it nearly $800 million. Ruble said the railroad company has not gotten back to them on Rocky Mountain Rail’s proposal.

“What does BNSF want?” he asked. “We know that is the $64,000 question.”

BNSF said in an emailed statement to The Denver Post Friday that it works with Amtrak, CDOT and RTD but is “not aware of other commuter/passenger authorities in Colorado.”

Rocky Mountain Rail, which is headed up by Bob Briggs, a former state lawmaker and former RTD director, is not a transit authority. The for-profit company aims to build a robust passenger and freight rail system to the “emerging Rocky Mountain Mega Region,” starting with lines to all corners of Colorado and eventually expanding to a footprint of 17 Western states.

But tackling the northwest corridor is a good place to start, Briggs said. Rocky Mountain Rail has more public meetings on its plan coming in Westminster, Boulder and Longmont over the next few weeks.

“We think we’re on the right track,” he said.

Louisville Mayor Ashley Stolzmann admits she’s skeptical of how Rocky Mountain Rail’s financial plan will pencil out. She wants assurances that any costs passed on to RTD or local municipalities like hers — in station access fees, for example — don’t end up double taxing a populace that has already paid millions into FasTracks.

But Stolzmann said she’s happy there’s at least a conversation being had about train service to her city — and to Boulder and Longmont beyond.

“We’re transit riders — we’ll absolutely ride a train,” she said. “It’s very frustrating that we’re not getting one.”

Rocky Mountain Rail Inc.’s remaining community forums will be held: