By Larry Sandler
For WisBusiness.com
— With ridership running ahead of expectations on Amtrak’s new Borealis, the Wisconsin Department of Transportation is studying whether to add a second daily round trip between Chicago, Milwaukee and the Twin Cities.
At the same time, the agency’s rail chief says a recently funded infrastructure project will lead to an eighth daily round trip between Milwaukee and Chicago as soon as 2026.
And a Montana official is raising the possibility that a proposed new long-distance rail line could provide crucial federal funding for future passenger train service to Madison and Eau Claire.
All that stems from the $66 billion appropriated for passenger rail through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law championed by outgoing Dem President Joe Biden. It’s not yet clear what Republican control of Congress and the White House will mean for future rail funding. President-elect Donald Trump didn’t mention rail at all in announcing his nominee for transportation secretary, Wisconsin’s ex-Congressman Sean Duffy, who hasn’t previously been involved in rail issues.
The Borealis debuted on May 21, replacing one Chicago-to-Milwaukee Hiawatha round trip and extending to St. Paul along the route used by Amtrak’s long-distance Empire Builder that stops in the Twin Cities on its way to the Pacific Northwest. The Borealis serves all Hiawatha and Empire Builder stations, including Sturtevant, Milwaukee’s Mitchell International Airport, Columbus, Portage, Wisconsin Dells, Tomah and La Crosse, as well as downtown Milwaukee..
Through Oct. 31, the Borealis carried 109,826 riders, exceeding projections by 10% to 15% each month, says Lisa Stern, WisDOT chief of rail and harbors.
As a result, the cafe car kept running out of some menu items for the first few weeks, until stocks were increased, according to the Minnesota Department of Transportation. Officials also are working on tweaking the schedule to account for the extra time needed for all those passengers to get on and off at stations, Stern says. And discussions are under way on whether to add another coach to each train and how to accommodate passenger requests to bring their bicycles aboard.
Notably, the Empire Builder hasn’t lost any riders since the Borealis started, say Stern and Amtrak spokesman Marc Magliari. In fact, the number of passengers getting on and off trains in St. Paul during September 2024 was more than double the same figure from September 2023, when only the Empire Builder was running, Magliari says.
“This has been our experience (elsewhere): Raising the number of frequencies doesn’t spread existing usage across more trains,” Magliari says. “It generally raises demand.”
Among the new riders attracted by the more convenient Borealis schedule are college students coming home for weekends, seasonal workers commuting to jobs in Wisconsin Dells and Twin Cities families heading to weekend getaways in Red Wing and Winona, Stern says.
Stern says those passengers appreciate that the Borealis provides “more reliable, on-time service” than the Empire Builder, which runs notoriously behind schedule, sometimes hours late on its eastbound trips. Although the Borealis started out with a 27% on-time record, 70% of its trains were running on time by early November, with late trains averaging delays of 22 to 38 minutes through October.
With that early success in mind, WisDOT has launched a study of whether a second daily Borealis round trip would be feasible. That was one of several Wisconsin passenger rail studies for which the Federal Railroad Administration awarded $500,000 grants in December 2023. However, at the time, a WisDOT spokesman declined to clarify whether the Borealis study would be looking at a second trip or at some other aspect of the service.
All of the studies — including those examining new service to Madison, Eau Claire and Green Bay — are in their preliminary stages, with consultants developing recommendations for their scope, budgets and timelines.
One major consideration in the Borealis study will be whether the Canadian Pacific Kansas City tracks need improvements to accommodate another round trip — plus the Empire Builder and the freight trains that share the tracks, Stern says.
On track for more trains to Chicago
But almost every proposal to increase Wisconsin passenger rail service depends on moving trains more efficiently through Milwaukee.
That goal was boosted by the October announcement of a $72.8 million federal grant for a $91 million project to build a bypass for CPKC freight trains to avoid delays when Amtrak trains are stopped in the Milwaukee Intermodal Station. A separate $17.2 million project is underway to add a second platform at the airport station for similar reasons.
The Hiawatha and the Borealis now run a combined total of seven round trips between Milwaukee and Chicago most days, with an eighth northbound Hiawatha on Friday nights and six round trips on Sundays. Increasing the daily total to 10 is the focus of another federally funded study for WisDOT.
Now that the Menomonee Valley bypass project is funded, the number of daily round trips can rise to eight as soon as the airport platform project is completed in 2026, Stern says.
When Wisconsin’s then-Transportation Secretary Craig Thompson made a similar statement in 2019, CPKC predecessor Canadian Pacific said it would not support any more Hiawatha trips without a pair of Chicago-area track improvements that it called “necessary to the viability of the project.” That was after the Illinois Department of Transportation had canceled the work in response to opposition from neighbors in suburban Glenview and Lake Forest.
However, spokespersons for both WisDOT and IDOT now say the freight railroad has agreed to an eighth round trip under the conditions that Stern outlined, with additional infrastructure improvements to be a subject of the Hiawatha study. Company spokesman Terry Cunha was less specific, saying only, “While infrastructure upgrades are still needed, CPKC has committed to working with Amtrak on increasing frequency on the corridor.”
Other WisDOT studies are examining service to Madison — eventually continuing to Eau Claire and the Twin Cities — and to Green Bay. Like the Borealis, those trains are expected to build on the Hiawatha, extending Chicago-to-Milwaukee trips to new destinations.
Could Montana plan bring Amtrak to Madison?
The Milwaukee-to-Madison route has been a source of partisan division for more than a decade. It had been a bipartisan goal when GOP Gov. Tommy Thompson championed the idea. And Republican Ray LaHood was U.S. transportation secretary under Dem President Barack Obama when Dem Gov. Jim Doyle’s administration won an $810 million grant for 110-mph service linking Chicago, Milwaukee and Madison.
But Republican Scott Walker campaigned against the train in his successful 2010 race for governor, saying he would spend the cash on highways instead. After he won, the federal government canceled the grant and gave the money to other states for their high-speed rail plans.
GOP Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu have remained loyal to Walker’s position, vowing to block any state funds for trains to Madison. By contrast, they have been silent about proposed service to Green Bay.
However, a Montana-led study could save the state a lot of money on the Madison route, says Dave Strohmaier, chairman of that state’s Big Sky Passenger Rail Authority.
Strohmaier’s authority landed another $500,000 federal grant to study reviving a long-distance Amtrak route that was originally called the North Coast Hiawatha and discontinued in 1979. Like the Empire Builder, that line ran from Chicago to Seattle and Portland, but was routed through southern Montana, where most of the state’s population lives.
Federal policy requires states to share much of the cost of Amtrak routes of less than 750 miles, like the Hiawatha and the Borealis. By contrast, long-distance routes like the Empire Builder are entirely federally funded.
Therefore, Strohmaier reasons, if the revived long-distance line — renamed the Big Sky North Coast — were to be routed through Madison and Eau Claire, the federal government might pick up the track improvement costs.
That would reduce the price tag for shorter-range state-supported service to those cities.
Stern says she hasn’t heard of that idea, but adds, “It definitely sounds like a good option to consider.”
That approach wouldn’t necessarily silence GOP opposition. The $810 million federal grant would have covered all capital costs — including stations and trains — but Walker still opposed committing the state to the comparatively smaller ongoing operating costs of Milwaukee-to-Madison service.
Routes to Superior and Kenosha studied
Eau Claire rail advocates would support routing a long-distance train through their city, says Scott Rogers, chair of the West Central Wisconsin Rail Coalition. At the same time, the Chippewa-St. Croix Rail Commission is leading its own federally funded study of service from Eau Claire to the Twin Cities. Unlike the other routes under study, that line could be operated by a private company, rather than by Amtrak.
Minnesota is leading yet another federally funded study to update plans for the Northern Lights Express, a 90-mph route that would connect Minneapolis to Duluth, with a stop in Superior. Federal authorities signed off on the line in 2017, but the Minnesota Legislature didn’t appropriate its $194.7 million share of the $592.3 million project until 2023, after Democrats won full control of that state’s government.
Dem Gov. Tony Evers requested $2.2 million for Wisconsin’s share of the Northern Lights Express in his 2023-’25 budget. But GOP lawmakers removed it after the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau questioned how soon Minnesota would need the money. It’s still not clear when Wisconsin’s share would be needed or what it would cover, according to MnDOT.
WisDOT says it’s too early to be sure what Evers will seek for passenger rail in his 2025-’27 budget.
Separately from the intercity rail proposals, Racine is leading a study of commuter rail service to Kenosha and Milwaukee, funded by a $5 million federal grant. That study is building on the 2009-‘11 work of the former Southeastern Regional Transit Authority, which tried to start a similar line called the KRM, linking to Chicago’s Metra trains at the existing Kenosha station..
But the KRM had a powerful foe in Vos. After Republicans took control of state government following the 2010 elections, Vos successfully led an effort to abolish the transit authority and every other fledgling RTA in Wisconsin. With Vos still in power, one focus of the new KRM study will be figuring out how to fund and govern a potential new commuter rail system.
