Welcome to the Borealis

Amtrak Borealis train waiting to depart St. Paul Union Depot on May 25th (further description on the Flickr version)

Finally.

It has taken a lifetime, but there are two train pairs a day running again on tracks between St. Paul and Chicago. Amtrak's new Borealis joins the storied Empire Builder to expand upon the extremely skeletal passenger service we've had to deal with across the Midwest and the rest of the country. Amtrak operated overnight sleeper trains from 1972 to 1981 (the Empire Builder complemented by the North Coast Hiawatha / Twin Cities Hiawatha and later North Star), but you'd have to run farther back to the pre-Amtrak era before 1971 to have multiple daytime trains on the route.

It's turned out to be a bittersweet time for me, since my father had moved into a senior care facility in the weeks leading up to the start of service. One of the reasons I started this blog in 2010 was because that marked nearly 20 years since my dad brought my brother and me to a public meeting about high-speed rail service being planned between the Twin Cities and Chicago, and we went to an event in Rochester where people were hoping it could pass through that city. Now, we're approaching 35 years since that study was done, and prospects of real HSR or even reasonably-frequent standard service seem more distant than ever—especially anything connecting Rochester.

Still, it has been a huge morale boost to see this train start running, much like how the start of Northstar commuter service in 2009 altered the way I looked at rail connectivity. That was a big contributor to why I started digging more into regional and intercity rail, while my previous focus had been more on metro-area streetcar and current/future light rail lines. I think a lot of people tend to focus too much on particular modes, while we need a holistic approach that provides mass transportation that works at many different scales, ranging from local ones that have stops just a few blocks apart up to high-speed lines with stops dozens or even hundreds of miles apart.

I have many thoughts swirling about how the Borealis is currently operating, what needs to be done to ensure its success, and options for future expansion. I hope this is a turning point for rail service in our region, and I'm glad to see there are other bright spots across the country where improvements are underway. Perhaps best of all, we finally have federal coordination through the Corridor ID (Identification and Development) program, which looks like it will be able to shepherd along the many different state and regional plans that often suffer from breakdowns in inter-state coordination. (It's a shame that states have had to put so much direct support into planning and funding anything under 750 miles in length—routes almost guaranteed to be interstate in nature, and always putting such lines at risk when states get out of sync with each other in terms of policy and planning.)

For now, I just want to welcome the Borealis, and hope to ride it often. I've already been able to take a day-trip down to Winona and back, and in combination with the Empire Builder, it will make it much easier to get to points further south and east. I have a future trip scheduled to La Crosse that will use a combination of trains, and we'll just have to see where else I decide to go.

A stringline chart showing the current schedules of the Empire Builder, Borealis, and Hiawatha trains between St. Paul, Milwaukee, and Chicago