The fledgling city of Denver survived fire, flood and hordes of grasshoppers in its early days, but one thing was lacking — fast, reliable transportation from Eastern cities. Isolated from the East, the city long yearned for a rail connection.

But when the Union Pacific pushed its transcontinental route through Cheyenne and across Wyoming in 1867, Denver’s hopes were crushed. The Cheyenne Daily Leader crowed, “Denver is too near Cheyenne to ever amount to much.” Businessmen fled Denver to the new economic center to the north.

Not dissuaded, civic boosters, including John Evans, Walter Cheesman, William Byers and others, raised $500,000 to build a roadbed across the 106 miles between Denver and Cheyenne. The UP did the track work and the first Denver Pacific train arrived in the city on June 24, 1870, “over a not remarkably even track,” John C. Smiley wrote in “History of Denver.”

The arrival set off a celebration of music, speeches and beer consumption. Tracks of the Kansas Pacific Railway arrived from Kansas City and St. Louis two months later.

By 1881, the city was home to the massive Union Station at the foot of 17th Street, built at the cost of $525,000 and home to 100 trains a day.

Much of Denver’s sprawl and its suburbs can be laid to the streetcar system, begun with a horse-drawn trolley from Seventh and Larimer streets to 27th and Champa streets in 1871. By 1927, Denver Tramway trolleys had reached out to the new “suburbs” of Congress Park, Curtis Park, Montclair, Cherry Creek, Englewood and Littleton, many founded on dreams of developers who saw that streetcars “enabled men of moderate means to acquire homes for themselves in pleasant places away from the business center,” said Smiley. The suburbs were born, and the auto followed.

The automobile, and air travel, doomed passenger trains. Today, only two Amtrak trains a day serve the city.

Denver joined the air age with the building of Denver Municipal Airport (later Stapleton Airfield) in 1929, far out on the plains east of downtown. It closed in 1995 to make way for Denver International Airport, even farther out of town and built at a cost of $4.8 billion, $2 billion more than projected. A failed baggage system delayed the airport’s opening for 16 months, but it finally saw its first planes on May 15, 1995. In 2007, the 53-square-mile airport was the 11th busiest in the world and the old Stapleton site is being redeveloped for housing, expected to be home to 30,000 new residents.

This year, redevelopment of Union Station is giving hopes to revival of the trolley system, known by the more modern moniker “light rail.” A $478.1 million budget will make the depot a transportation hub with light-rail routes eventually stretching to Golden, Boulder, the southeast suburbs and Denver International Airport.