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Starting April 7, two more trains will be added to both the northbound and southbound Saturday schedule, allowing people more choices as to when they would like to arrive and depart from each station. The first train of the day will arrive in Santa Fe an hour earlier, at 10:16 a.m., allowing people more time to enjoy the farmers market and other morning events at the Santa Fe Railyard. There will now be a train leaving Santa Fe at 9 p.m. on Saturdays, allowing people to travel to Santa Fe, have dinner and then return to downtown Albuquerque.
Read more: http://www.koat.com/news/30711274/detai ... z1qEhqSfMZ
It appears that another summer will go by without commuter-train service at the never-used Rail Runner Express station built years ago near the intersection of Zia Road and St. Francis Drive.
Although city officials last August approved a plan for putting the idle station to use and for using city money to reimburse a developer for sidewalks, the state Department of Transportation says it won't ask train planners to begin service there any time soon.
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At the urging of local officials, the state spent more than $1 million to build the train platform in 2008 on the public right-of-way with the intention that owners of adjacent land would build access to it as part of a development project. Legal hurdles, neighborhood disputes and economic challenges kept that development from moving ahead right away.
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"I can tell you that many entities within the department were against Zia [Road station] because they knew," he said. "Our traffic engineers are pretty smart people. They knew that the Zia Road station was not really going to be able to work. There was opposition to it internally, but for political reasons they went ahead with it anyway."
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Santa Fe stations that are in use include the South Capitol Station near the Department of Transportation headquarters between Cordova Road and Alta Vista Street, the downtown Railyard Depot and a park-and-ride stop near the interchange of N.M. 599 and Interstate 25.
Starting May 21, New Mexico Rail Runner Express will operate a new express train service between Albuquerque and Sante Fe, N.M., and add new amenities.
Riders using the new express service will be able to cut commute times by 20 to 25 minutes in each direction between the two cities, Rail Runner Express officials said in a prepared statement.
The express train will skip three stations and operate with a second locomotive on the train to save time during the steep climb on the way to Santa Fe. The express service will operate in the morning and evening.
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