Travelers ride a light rail Tuesday morning, July 10, at the Nine Mile Station. The City of Aurora may ask RTD to name the coming I-225 line something that brands it as Aurora. (Marla R. Keown/Aurora Sentinel)

I just recalled that RTD​ dubbed Aurora’s long-awaited A-train, or A-Towner, or A-Ride, or even the Z-rail or Q-Tip — the “R-Line.”

The R-Line. Dumb. What’s it supposed to hint or mean? “Ruh-Roar-Ruh?”

We deserve better. More letters, and from the front of the alphabet.

Let Mountain View or Thornton have “R.” We want our “A,” back. Let me point out that there are hardly so many rail lines in the FasTracks system that we’re running out of all the good letters. The system goes from A,B,C,D,E,F,G — R. There’s a stop at L for something in Downtown Denver that makes absoLuteLy Little Logic, but, hey, RTD’s whole name is nothing but letters.

Denver stole our “A” for Denver International Airport, which should be called the “Air Train” anyway.

Sheesh.

“A” is for “Aurora.” “R” is for “Really?” RTD is for Ride To Denver.

11 replies on “PERRYBLOG: Can’t kick RTD enough for slapping Aurora with the ‘R’ Line”

  3. The “A Line” was always meant for the airport. Just like the northwest line was always going to be the “B Line”. These were established in plans even well before FasTracks.

  4. I’ve always wondered why letters and not colors? Isn’t that the industry standard? I’m thinking Chicago, New York, & Boston. At least in my experience in those cities, the color is the first “level” of organization. In Denver it seems to be the other way around: letters first, and then colors that aren’t really used to differentiate lines. In NY, I seem to recall there being a sub-level of organization that is below the color, for example, a B-train on the Orange line or something to that effect. For some reason this seems more intuitive to me. What do y’all think?

    1. You must not be visting the same NYC that I’ve been to. No one uses colors to say which train they are going to use, unless they’re…tourists!…(gasp!). The primary reference is not the color, but the number or letter of the route, while the coloring scheme is more or less to differentiate the major trunk lines. In other news, LA is considering the move to a letter based naming system with the opening of a new trunk line in their downtown in the next 5 years to simplify the color-based naming scheme they have been using until this point. Gone will be the Red, Purple, Gold, Blue, and Green lines and in will come the A, B, C, D, G, F, L, and other letters.

      Boston and Chicago have fewer routes, so there are enough primary and secondary colors to deal with them. Denver has exceeded the number of routings that it is prudent to move to at least a letter based if not a number/letter based naming scheme.

      1. To be honest, I’ve only been to NY once, so you’re probably right; maybe it was just a tourist’s impression. For some reason I had it in my head that colors were the usual method of differentiation. I suppose there isn’t much difference between saying the “red line” and saying the “A line,” and a letter system has more options for expansion. In this way, it makes sense!

        1. A New Yorker would call it the “A train” not the “A line”. Also, generally in Manhattan it’s the A/C/E (or “A-C-E”) the 1/2/3, the N/Q/R train(s).

          These are much easier to remember than other places where there is no route naming scheme except for the service name — London’s Jubilee, Northern, Circle, etc. While Paris has numbers.

  6. A for Are You Kidding Me Line.
    B for Bumfuck Eastern Colorado Line.
    K for Kansas Line.
    R for Retards Line.
    S for Saudi Aurora Line.
    T for Terminal (Go to Aurora to die) Line
    W for Why? Line

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