“If I could do it all over again, and I could be the multi-billionaire who starts a bunch of businesses or a conductor on the California Zephyr going through the canyons of Colorado, I’d take the canyons.””

Brad Swartzwelter

COAL CREEK -- Conductor Brad Swartzwelter’s primary interest has always been trains, even from before he can remember. When he was around two years old, his mother took him on a train ride from Denver to Ottumwa, Iowa. While he does not remember the trip, his mother says he enjoyed it greatly.

As a kid, Swartzwelter’s interest in trains only grew. As many kids do, he played with a train set and, further encouraging his interest, his parents would stop the car whenever they drove by a train so that he could watch it.

Swartzwelter’s family often vacationed at Sheriff Ranch in Granby, fishing with a lease on the Colorado River. During these vacations, he watched and waved at the Rio Grande Zephyr rolling through. For him, this fascination has been “a lifelong ailment, [for which] I’ve tried numerous remedies [and] there is no cure.”

Swartzwelter grew up in Boulder, graduating from Fairview High School in 1982. He attended Metropolitan State College of Denver, using the proceeds from selling a landscape company he ran to fund his tuition. He focused on travel administration and tourism during his college career, aiming to find a job in the passenger train business. 

When Swartzwelter graduated, there were no jobs available in the business. He found his start in Gillette, Wyoming, running coal trains for the Burlington Northern Railroad (reporting mark BN).

After being furloughed in Gillette, Swartzwelter continued in a new BN position in Seattle, Washington. Around this time, he joined Amtrak amidst the creation of Cascades, a rail corridor created in partnership with Washington and Oregon.

Working for Amtrak, Swartzwelter oversaw the growth of the corridor, which runs between Vancouver, British Columbia, and Eugene, Oregon. He also ran operations of the Coast Starlight and Empire Builder trains, as well as doing a lot of yard work for the company.

In 1998, after various mudslides in Seattle, Swartzwelter was furloughed again. Frustrated with the conditions preventing him from working and trains from traveling, he thought more about ways to develop more robust, reliable, sustainable, and efficient transportation.

After several years of research, Swartzwelter published his book Faster than Jets: A Solution to America’s Long-Term Transportation Problems in 2003. In the book, he proposed what he considered the best and most plausible form of transportation possible: subsurface vacuum tube maglev transportation.

In 2004, Swartzwelter presented this concept at a conference in Redmond, Washington. Representatives of PayPal, released in 2002 as a merger between eBay and online payment service X.com, attended the conference.

In 2013, X.com co-founder Elon Musk proposed the high-speed transportation system known as “hyperloop.” The system implements concepts similar to those proposed by Swartzwelter in Faster than Jets and presented in Redmond.

However, Swartzwelter does not consider Musk a thief. Rather, he credits Musk for publicizing and popularizing the concept of hyperloop transportation on a massive scale. He also says that China has taken the concept of underground maglev transportation and developed it further, with test tracks exceeding expectations and bringing the concept closer to deployment.

Swartzwelter had resettled in Colorado in 2008, moving with his wife and children to support other immediate family. Since 1987, he had kept his eyes on properties overlooking the East Ridge of Colorado.

Flipping multiple houses from 1987 onward, he lived in Superior until 2020. That year, he bought his current house, with economic conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic making the purchase of a house in a dream location feasible. While he and his family love the uninterrupted view of the landscape, the main draw for him is the view of the railroad that runs through Ten Mile Canyon.

In 2023, Swartzwelter published the concept thriller The Last Zephyr under the pseudonym C. B. (Conductor Brad) Blackforest (the English translation of his German surname). The novel centers around the California Zephyr as it travels through the Moffat Tunnel. The American West is completely devastated when the Yellowstone Caldera erupts, and the passengers, trapped in the tunnel, fight to escape.

Swartzwelter wrote the book, his first effort in fiction, with colleagues on the train as an experiment to create a worst-case scenario and find a way to get out of it. He incorporated elements of reality, such as the location and the train, into the book, even bringing focus onto the Silver Sky train car he most likely rode in on his first ever train ride.

While incorporating these elements, Swartzwelter also didn’t limit himself to absolute facts, building the story primarily around the scenario. Because of this, he refers to the novel as “plausible fiction.”

Swartzwelter has also pursued music on his own time, playing at local open mics and, more recently, branching out into professional local gigs. For him, seeing people enjoying the music he plays feels similar to seeing his train passengers dazzled by the scenery they pass by.

Swartzwelter retired as an Amtrak conductor in 2024 after an over 30-year career. On his final ride as a conductor, he took the last trip of the ski season in the Winter Park Express on March 31st.

Swartzwelter was instrumental in creating the original plan for the express, a revival of the historic Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad. Logging around 80 rides on the Rio Grande Ski Train as an intern in the 1990s, the route stopped running in March 2009.

Inspired by a 2014 article by Bob Brewster for the Colorado Rail Passenger Association to re-establish the route, he proposed a plan to re-launch it to Winter Park’s then-president, Gary DeFrange. Amtrak approved the plan, hosting occasional passenger rides from 2015 until its permanent return in 2017. As a conductor, Swartzwelter logged 212 trips on the express.

During his time as an Amtrak conductor, Swartzwelter aimed to bring a love of passenger railroading to the general public. He particularly advocates for passenger railroads because, more than any other mode of transportation, they allow travel through the remote wilderness and an escape from locations completely dominated by human influence.

Retiring has not stopped Swartzwelter’s passion for trains. He still advocates for the preservation of passenger railroads, considering the future of his children in particular. He hopes that future generations can experience traveling on trains and absorbing themselves into a landscape that isn’t human-centric.

For Swartzwelter, it’s one thing to travel through human development and cities on a railroad route and another to be completely surrounded by manmade objects at all times, even on railroads. He hopes the continued preservation of passenger railroads also encourages the preservation of remote areas of wilderness.

Since retirement, Swartzwelter has proposed another idea to build a “truck-by-train” rail bridge to alleviate traffic on Interstate 70. He proposes that allowing large commercial vehicles to travel on rail trains will decrease the congestion of traffic, thus decreasing the cost of closures, injuries, and loss of life from accidents.

Swartzwelter’s passion for trains will always be a part of him and his life. He knows there’s no better life choice for him: “If I could do it all over again, and I could be the multi-billionaire who starts a bunch of businesses or a conductor on the California Zephyr going through the canyons of Colorado, I’d take the canyons.”

You can follow Brad Swartzwelter on Instagram by going to @swartzwelter.