The FrontRunner is a commuter rail line serving the Salt Lake City area, with 89 miles of track between Ogden and Provo. (The name is a play on words of the fact that it serves communities along the Wasatch Mountain Front.) The line opened in 2008, and is operated by the Utah Transit Authority, and is part of a system that includes the TRAX light rail system, as well as local buses, although they use different fares. The first part of the line that opened was between Salt Lake City and its northern suburb of Ogden, with the rest of the line opened in 2012.
Among commuter rail systems in the United States, the FrontRunner is disproportionately popular, and in 2019, had slightly more riders than Seattle's Sounder commuter rail system, despite the Seattle area having a much higher population than the Salt Lake City area, and despite the Seattle train system being established earlier. And also, significantly, Seattle is much more liberal.
And this is what interests me here: right now, in the United States, almost every government function is polarized, including functions that would have a few years ago been too boring for debate. Public transit is one of those, and in many places, mass transit is seen by some "conservatives" as insidious, a suspicious thing from urban areas that brings crime to innocent suburbs. So I find it interesting that in Utah, one of the most Republican states, has politically and popularly embraced rail transit, and that it has a modern, efficient system that doesn't seem to be burdened with any baggage in popular sentiment. It is an example of the fact that the political dichotomies we use to describe the United States are not always true, and that when problems are viewed without the skewed lenses of cultural conflicts, sensible solutions can present themselves quite quickly.