Officials at Denver International Airport on Tuesday unveiled six new train cars carrying passengers from the main terminal to the airport’s concourses.
DIA CEO Phil Washington said the new cars will lead to a “more efficient operation” moving passengers throughout the airport. They will allow the airport to move 850 more people each hour to their gates.
In addition to increased capacity, the brand new cars are decked out with new digital display monitors and updated climate control while also allegedly boasting more energy efficiency, officials said. A total of 26 will be put into commission this year, replacing most of the old fleet and expanding the total to 41 cars in all.
The hope is that the new cars will alleviate large crowds that have bottlenecked on the train platform – many going viral in clips shared to social media.
Washington stopped short of saying the new trains will be an end-all, be-all solution to delays at the nation’s sixth-busiest airport.
”What we've said is there's got to be some bumps in the road, where, you know, we have to work through those,” he said in an interview with Denver7 Tuesday. “But my hope was that you won't see those large crowds. But there's various reasons why we might have large crowds out here that have nothing to do with the train. And so we need to look through those things.”
Watch Phil Washington discuss potential "bumps in the road" with the new train cars, and a timeline for when the airport could move forward with an alternative to the trains, in the video player below:
As the shiny new train cars take aim at those delays, many passengers likely still wonder: What about an alternative to the train altogether? We took that question to Washington, who said airport officials started soliciting ideas about a year-and-a-half ago for “redundancy” for the trains.
One of those ideas included a pedestrian bridge from terminal A to terminal B, and from B to C.
“We're looking at those [ideas],” he said. “We're gonna make a call on those or whether we proceed with that, probably in the next six months or so. But they're not cheap. And we need to understand what our priorities are and prioritize.”
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