Well the
Utah Rail Passengers Association is reporting via Building Salt Lake that neither Utah proposal made the cut.
Quite disappointing, to say the very least.
This excerpt from the commentary near the bottom of that linked seems to point to the "probable cause" ─ foot-dragging.
For the Pioneer route, there's no indication that Idaho could have failed to collaborate in concert and respond before the late March deadline, IDK. The Idaho Transportation Department had applied for the grant, with the city of Boise, the UTA and UDOT included as partners. The FRA states that it pays special emphasis to projects that benefit rural and underserved communities. The extent of documented public outreach and engagement undertaken or in process during and following that deadline period is unknown. Gardner expressed a lot of optimism in the potential of a Salt Lake to Boise route, comparing it to other similar, successful routes Amtrak currently has.
In the case of the Big Sky Passenger Rail Authority's (BSPRA) consortium proposal to restore service along (most of) the North Coast Hiawatha route, the BSPRA completed and published last July (2023) a report detailing the public engagement for passenger rail serving rural and tribal communities throughout Montana. That meant that the BSPRA had to have begun the process quite early on, likely around May 2023. It also was known to have submitted the application before the deadline.
It's not entirely clear which if any of the routes that respondents for routes for which proposals were submitted were declined because of a missed deadline. That might not have been the case though with the Pioneer or Desert Wind proposal, although it does seem coincidental (and suspicious) that neither was selected, even though Nevada itself was involved with the Desert Wind route. Somehow, somewhere the ball seems to have been dropped, even if it had been picked back up. .