Well, part of my thought is that the local Denver-Ski Areas traffic wouldn't want to deal with the unreliability of the train coming from Chicago or California, so I was figuring that that "didn't count" as a Ski Train frequency. I was therefore planning a two-out, two-back schedule.
I just looked at Glenwood Springs and realized that (a) there is a wye which could be reinstated, and (b) there are sidings on which the train could be held off the mainline between arrival and departure. Nice.
(More fascinating to me is that the branch line to Aspen has been turned into a trail.)
I went to the trouble of calculating the entire potential lost traffic: assuming
-- a Ski Train runs Denver-Grand Junction and connects with service from Chicago-Denver, so those riders are still on trains
-- Helper and Green River lose service
-- SLC-Ski Areas, Provo-Ski Areas lose all riders
-- Emeryville-Ski Areas and Sacramento - Ski Areas lose all riders, which is an exaggeration (some would stay overnight in Denver, some would rent cars in Salt Lake)
-- I had to use high estimates for some because I couldn't extract the exact numbers from the NARP ridership datasheets.
The total potential lost ridership is less than 21,000/year. (Sadly I lost my calculations in a browser error. But anyway.) Unsurprisingly most skiiers coming from the west are going to Grand Junction, fewer to Glenwood Springs, almost none to Granby or Winter Park.
I think you could get a lot more than that from:
-- stations in the Front Range of Colorado (either Boulder/Longmont/Loveland/Fort Collins or Brighton/Greeley)
-- a trip time which is minimum 2.5 hours shorter (on the Boulder route) or 3.5 hours shorter (on the Greeley route)
(I used 1972 Amtrak timings for Ogden-Denver, but I deleted the excessive 25 minute layover in Cheyenne.)
-- Daytime service to Salt Lake City, and better times in both directions
-- Better departure and arrival times in California, allowing for better connections from distant points in the Bay Area
-- Laramie and Cheyenne passengers
OF course, if there are *two* trains a day from Denver to Chicago, then you want to sit down and look at the schedules all over again. Maybe I'll do that. For that, we really want to assume the Iowa rail project.