The curves of the River Route

Sharp curves along the Mississippi River rail route used by Amtrak's Empire Builder and Borealis. Red, orange, and yellow denote zones where curves dictate speeds of about 75 mph or less. Most of the route is currently constrained to 65 mph for passenger trains instead of the usual 79 mph limit.

I've recently been trying to wrap my head around the speed zones for passenger trains between St. Paul and La Crosse along the Mississippi River. A post from Korh on the UrbanMSP forums got me interested in taking a closer look at track curvature and the concepts of superelevation (banking or cant) and cant deficiency (underbalance, the amount a vehicle wants to swing outward).

I dug up Alon Levy's post about calculating speeds, and ended up using Ari Ofsevit's method linked at the end, which involves tracing lines from the outer rail to the inner rail and back out again to create chords to estimate the degree of curvature.

Example of drawing a chord between outer and inner tracks as a way of deriving approximate curvature, from Ari Ofsevit's spreadsheet

While observing Borealis trips on the asm.transitdocs.com tracker, such as this run on June 12th, I'd noticed that much of the route appeared to be limited to 65 mph, with only limited sections allowing 75 or 79 mph.

I was reminded today that the Midwest Regional Rail Initiative (MWRRI) had produced a report for 110-mph train service in the corridor, which included travel time modeling graphs. The graphs also show the attainable speeds for standard Amtrak trains in light green, confirming the mostly-65 mph speed zones:

Passenger train speed plot from Tomah, Wisconsin to north of Red Wing, MN showing a hypothetical 110-mph train in dark green (limited to 90 mph along most of the river corridor) and what a current Amtrak train speed would be in light green. (One of three graphs, travel time is likely for Milwaukee through St. Paul to Minneapolis)

 

At the speeds we're concerned about here, increasing superelevation by one inch or allowing one extra inch of cant deficiency in the rail cars translates to a speed limit increase of about 5 mph. For example, going from a combination of 3 inches of superelevation and 3 inches of cant deficiency to 4 inches of superelevation and 5 inches of cant deficiency would likely allow a 65-mph zone to become a 79-mph zone.

Selected probable speed limits given a combination of superelevation and cant deficiency in inches, color-coded to match the map at the top of this article. Increasing by the equivalent of 3 inches increases possible speeds by 10 to 20 mph in most cases. See the full calculator.

These appear to be the main factors that the MWRRI study used to justify higher speeds along the Mississippi River route—they planned to increase the height of the outside rail to 4" of banking whenever possible (the starting point is unclear, though they do mention 2.5" as an "optimal" amount on page 3-5 of the main study document), and hoped to gain another 2" from enhanced cant deficiency of tilting trains, going from a standard of 4" to 6".

Partial description of the guidelines used when modeling train speed and trip time, from the beginning on page 4-1 of the main MWRRI study document

Even with that, they only planned to have 90-mph speeds along the river, with a lot of curves requiring drops down to about 85 mph (although they neglected a few spots where 110-mph running appears reasonable: around Kellogg, around Frontenac, and between Red Wing and Hastings).

Alon Levy argues against tilting trains these days, saying they don't really provide enough speed benefit to justify their extra maintenance cost. They also note that other countries are running non-tilting trains with 180 mm (about 7") of cant deficiency, which is the same as what Amtrak has been allowed on their tilting Talgos and Acelas. (One of the limiting factor there may have been the heavy non-tilting locomotives rather than the passenger compartments, which are capable of much greater tilt and underbalance.)

As Alon notes, cant deficiency is primarily an issue of how the suspension system of a train behaves, so equipment with higher centers of gravity and softer springs/dampers will tend to swing further outward on curves than other train cars. Alon referred to a "magic HSR waiver" proposal, which might be in this federal register notice, where Amtrak proposed allowing higher cant deficiency on their trains following testing. In that notice, it suggested operators could apply to allow 4" on Superliner equipment like on the Empire Builder and 6" on single-level equipment like what the Borealis runs.

This Federal Railroad Administration freight+passenger superelevation study from 2019 didn't include rail height standards from Canadian Pacific, but did note that they limit cant deficiency to 3". Considering current speed limits on the river route, they presumably limit most curves to 2 to 3" of superelevation.

I believe the only Amtrak trains that have been using significant amounts of Canadian Pacific track until this year have been the Adirondack in New York, the Hiawatha between Milwaukee and Chicago, and the Empire Builder on our familiar route. It's quite likely that they've set standards based on the Builder's Superliners, so it would be worth having MnDOT, WisDOT, and even NYSDOT (since the Adirondack uses single-level trains) get together with CPKC and the FRA to determine if 1" to 2" of additional cant deficiency can be allowed with existing equipment, boosting speeds by 5-10 mph on curvy sections.

I haven't been able to find any allowable cant deficiency information for Siemens Venture / Amtrak Airo passenger equipment that is being planned/procured for many lines across the country.

There are some true limits when it comes to cant deficiency—you don't want a rail car to swing outward from an inner track to hit a slow or stopped freight train leaning inward, for instance. However, that's not an issue on single-tracked parts of the route, so those sections would be the best ones to increase speeds on to begin with. Most of the single-track sections along the river are 6 to 10 miles in length, allowing several miles of faster running at a time before needing to worry about adjacent freight cars.

If half of the speed gains on this section were just supposed to come from better equipment rather than major investment in the track itself, we should make sure we're using our existing and planned train cars as effectively as possible. It doesn't remove the need to maintain track well enough to remove bumps and wobbles on the smaller scale, but it would substantially lessen the need to increase banking on curves.

The flatness of California HSR, vs. someday Driftless rail

I recently did a scan through California's Central Valley on Google Maps to trace out the California High-Speed Rail construction zones currently visible there. The imagery there will be lagging the real world significantly, but shows a nearly continuous stretch being built from Shafter, CA outside of Bakersfield up to Fresno. It's mostly just right-of-way and parts of bridges so far, with a few that are structurally complete.

What struck me is how unbelievably flat the area is. The default view of this embedded map uses a "terrain" background layer, and it's hard to find any topographical contour lines (Depending on zoom level, Google appears to mark differences of 40 or 80 feet). You can change the background to an aerial ("satellite") view by clicking the upper-right icon to pop out the sidebar, and then an icon should appear at the bottom of that to use an alternate backdrop.

Someday we'll need true high-speed rail on the Twin Cities–Milwaukee–Chicago corridor, which will involve getting through the Driftless Area of southeastern Minnesota and western Wisconsin. Even getting the Empire Builder / Borealis route upgraded to higher speeds will require dealing with it (those trains are mostly limited to 65 mph between Red Wing and La Crosse / La Crescent today, and historic trains only got to between 70 and 80 mph for most of that segment).

The area is pretty flat compared to much of California, but will be a much bigger topographical challenge than the Central Valley, considering the bluffs were created by the Mississippi River and its various feeders digging a channel that drops more than 600 feet below the surrounding landscape.

It's nothing compared to the roughly 3,400 feet that California HSR will need to climb from Bakersfield to the Tehachapi Pass, or the apparent 2,500-foot drop from Palmdale to Burbank (mostly happening in tunnels under the San Gabriel Mountains). But, the soft karst (dolomite, limestone, and sandstone) geology has made many small valleys that could create the need for lots of smaller bridges and tunnels to run through and between them.

On one hand, we've had some very good experiences tunneling in similar conditions at MSP airport, where the twin 1-mile tunnels apparently only cost about $117 million (probably 2004 dollars, which is still a bit shy of $200 million today if going by consumer inflation), but we've also seen costs skyrocket for Southwest LRT, which has had to deal with much swampier conditions along much of its route.

Eroded bluff faces will probably be more challenging than the flat land the airport tunnels were built through, but hopefully the rock will still be favorable for tunneling through. I'm sure we'll have to create some significant ones if we ever hope to get 90-mph, 110-mph, or faster trains running along the river corridor.

Some potential for "hot rocks" in railroading

A set of switches and crossover tracks along BNSF's double-track mainline west of Minot, near Lonetree, North Dakota (Google Maps)

While looking around on Google Maps to better understand some aspects of railroad operation, these little white blobs began catching my attention in aerial shots. After a while, I saw through Street View that they are propane tanks. Okay, maybe fuel for backup generators? Seems strange, but okay.

Then, the other day, I went back to look at some of the infrastructure BNSF Railway built in North Dakota about a decade ago. The whole 100-mile stretch between Minot and Williston received major upgrades and became fully double-tracked. At the site above, they installed fairly high-speed switches featuring movable-point frogs, which allow faster train operation with smoother ride quality while reducing the chance of derailment.

There are four switches here (or turnouts, as they're sometimes called), and 8 spots where there are "switch machines," the motorized units that push or pull on a piece of rail, and also include interlocking components and sensors to ensure the switch actually moved into the correct position. Switches usually have one of these motorized units, just for the main switch points, but the movable frog also has a motor attached in this situation.

Moving a set of switch points back and forth does take some effort, but why in the world would you need four 1,000-gallon propane tanks for that? Looking them up, I saw they mostly used standard 110-volt or even 24-volt power, for which that amount of stored energy is extreme overkill. After a while, I finally remembered it's all about snow and ice in the winter, and the heat needed to fend that off.

Metra in Chicago famously uses open-flame heaters on certain switches in their network, particularly those at the busy A-2 interlocking near Metra's Western Avenue station. There, a set of three tracks crosses another set of four tracks at a shallow angle, each intersecting with double-slip switches.

The rear end of a commuter train that has just passed through the orange flames shooting up around switches at the A-2 interlocking in Chicago, with the control tower visible to the right (Metra)

There are multiple different ways of heating up rails and other components that make up switches, including direct flame like this, resistive nichrome wire attached to the side of the rail, and forced air systems that use blowers to push air across gas, electric, or infrared heaters and duct it throughout different parts of the switch.

It seems that forced-air systems are the most common, and that's the type of heater at the installation in North Dakota. Many forced-air heaters have thin gray ducts that run lengthwise through the switch area, and the blower/heater assembly and its main output duct sit off to the side of the switch.

Ducts running lengthwise between the points of a railroad switch (Rails Company via railsystem.net)

Diagram of a switch heater system. 1) Heater and blower. 2) Main duct 3) Distribution duct sitting under the tracks like a railroad tie with small angled ducts heat the tips of the switch points and 4) parallel ducts running lengthwise to heat the track bed and rails. 5) Switch motor being heated by a duct outside the rails (Rails Company via railsystem.net)

Metra says that the A-2 interlocking area is too tightly packed for forced-air heating systems to work. I'm skeptical, since the track is on an elevated embankment, and something could probably be piped underground, but it's certainly true that the standard setup with heater/blower units sitting off to the side of the tracks would be a no-go at that site.

Someday, those double-slip switches and their fiery heaters will disappear when the A-2 interlocking finally gets replaced with a flyover (a project that should also add another West Loop Metra station). Switches in other locations will still need to be heated, however.

I count 22 of the 1,000-gallon tanks at the BNSF crossover site, which represent a pretty massive amount of energy. Other similar sites seem to sometimes have 24 or even 32 tanks—three or four for every switch and frog. These types of tanks get filled to about 800 gallons, leaving room for fuel to expand and for vaporization to occur. Propane tanks are recommended to be refilled once they get down to 20% full, otherwise they're susceptible to freezing up, so that gives about 600 gallons of usable energy per tank.

A 1,000-gallon tank is big enough to supply a house with heat and hot water for a year or more, so it's stunning that a single heater may require four times as much fuel. While a large house might have a 100,000-BTU/hr furnace (about 29 kW), switch heaters may be rated at 400,000 to even 900,000 BTUs/hr (117 to 264 kW). At full tilt, one could be consuming up to about 10 gallons of propane per hour (propane contains roughly 91,500 BTUs of energy per gallon).

Steel rails are enormous heat sinks, of course, with these rails likely weighing 132 lbs per yard or more on their own, and being able to rapidly transmit any heat that gets dumped into them. While a lot of heat is needed to counteract that, these sites may also be sized according to some worst-case temperature conditions that affect the fuel itself.

Propane has a boiling point of −44°F (−42°C), so it's typically a gas at room temperature. Since propane tanks are pressure vessels that contain the boiled-off gas, the container is able to reach equilibrium at several to a dozen or so times atmospheric pressure, with most of the fuel staying in liquid form.

However, as the outdoor temperature drops, the liquid boils less readily and less vapor is able to be fed into the burner. As the temperature declines from 30°F (−1°C) zero to −20°F (-29°C), the vaporization rate drops by 90%, so only about 1 gallon worth of fuel becomes available as a gas per hour. Of course, vaporization devices exist to preheat the fuel, so it's more likely that these mini tank farms are sized for the seasonal heating needs.

Are there ways we could avoid burning stuff to keep these pieces of track free of ice? It's a lot of heat, although perhaps not quite so crazy considering the size of the area. The whole rail crossover site is more than a quarter-mile long, and covers around 4 acres, around the size of a small city block.

If only low-grade heat is necessary, heat pumps could probably work, though they would need to be tied to underground loops in order to be effective on really cold days. On warmer days, the heat pumps could pull heat from outside and charge up the underground reservoir somewhat, which would be an interesting idea to think through.

I originally started this article thinking of the growing number of companies doing above-ground thermal storage, also known as heat batteries. One that gets a lot of press is Rondo, who say their primary model of heat battery can store 100 MWh of energy, and is able to provide heat output at a rate of 7 MW, which would be ample for a site like this.

If it could be hooked up in the right way, that type of battery could provide heat for this site for several days even in very cold temperatures. Just using hot sand or rocks is one of the cheapest ways we've found to store energy. 

Propane is annoyingly cheap when comparing against green alternatives, especially in places like North Dakota, but it would be interesting to see if someone can make the financial cost worthwhile without even needing to think about the environmental benefits.

It's clear that there are technical options for making greener energy sources work for this purpose, though finding the right combination of energy transmission and storage solutions to make it cheap and robust will take some work to figure out.

Northstar v. COVID (and the people who've always wanted to kill it)

Passengers wait to board an approaching Northstar train at Ramsey station on June 4, 2024. About 30 people boarded from the platform for this trip.

When COVID lockdowns gripped the country and the world in March 2020, Metro Transit's Northstar commuter trains received perhaps harshest service cut of any commuter rail system in the US. On March 23rd, a week and a half after Minnesota stopped business as usual, Northstar service was cut from the already paltry 72 train trips per week down to just 20—a cut of 72% on its own, of course combined with the loss of special event service.

This chart shows relative service levels for Northstar and several other commuter services, as measured in vehicle revenue hours (number of rail passenger cars and locomotives multiplied by the number of hours in service), with the peak service level from the decade of 2013-2022 pegged at 100%: 

Data from National Transit Database agency profiles. Somehow, Northstar's service level varied by 15% in the years before the pandemic and peaked in 2014, though I don't know of schedule changes that explain that. Special event service only adds about 3%. The most likely explanation is that it's from changes in train length.

Those are considered as Metro Transit's peer agencies and routes in the Northstar Corridor Post-Pandemic Study from March of last year: Utah Transit Agency's FrontRunner in Salt Lake City, Sound Transit's Sounder in Seattle, Trinity Railway Express in Dallas–Fort Worth, the North County Transit District's Coaster in San Diego, and oddly the Amtrak Downeaster—somehow classified as a commuter train even though it has a route length and regional-rail service pattern similar to the planned Northern Lights Express to Duluth. 

A huge frustration with Northstar has always been that it began operation as a half-built service, and in more ways than one. We are all familiar with the idea that it was intended to go to St. Cloud or even slightly beyond, and that it got cut back to Big Lake—39 miles instead of an targeted 70 or 80. Less well-known is that it was also supposed to have a broader service schedule, with 18 one-way trips per weekday instead of the 12 that we got (plus the six trips each day on weekends), as noted on page 6 of the Post-Pandemic Study.

Text and graphic from page 6 of the Northstar Corridor Post-Pandemic Study from 2023

How substantial of a difference did it make reducing the planned service by ⅓? It's hard to say for certain, but ⅔ of the initial 4,030 weekday rider projection is 2,687, slightly above the 2019 observed weekday ridership of 2,660, and approximately the level that Northstar had at least touched by 2013. The observed ridership also grew by 46% from 2009 to 2019, above the 39% growth predicted for the period up through 2025.

A chart showing Northstar weekday ridership on an upward trend from 2009 until 2019, with peaks around halfway between 2,500 and 3,000 in the years 2013, 2017, 2018, and 2019.

The chart above shows a nice trend of growth over the years for weekday service, though a depressing decline on weekends where there was an oddball schedule of three round-trips, which was done by running a single trainset from Big Lake down to Minneapolis and back. I've never seen weekend ridership charted for Northstar before coming across this study, so it's interesting to observe how that would have dragged down the total number of riders each year, even if the weekdays with more service were improving.

From the beginning, Northstar had the lowest level of service of any route in the Post-Pandemic Study, and has some of the lowest service of any in the country. One of the only lines to have less service was the WeGo Star in Nashville (formerly the Music City Star). Unfortunately, that line doesn't report numbers to the National Transit Database, so I can't directly compare figures, but it seems to now be exceeding Northstar in terms of ridership, probably just because our service cuts were so severe.

Another thing stoking my indignation as I look through this information is that Northstar historically has historically had quite good utilization in terms of seats filled vs. the number of seats that are available.

Northstar had 54.76 riders per vehicle hour in 2019 (the chart is mislabeled with 2017), second only to Sounder at 60.98. In 2021, the worst full year for post-pandemic ridership among most agencies, Northstar was very close to FrontRunner, Sounder, and TRE passenger loads per car.

The National Transit Database now has another full year of data available vs. the 2021 comparisons in the study. In 2022, Northstar pulled slightly ahead of all of its peers, even though it was still running with just two round-trips per day.

Now, if Northstar was supposed to have been hitting a ridership target 50 or 100% higher than it initially did, it would be well off the chart, up around 82 to 110 passengers per hour. Caltrain had passenger loads in the 80s and 90s prior to the pandemic, but that's an unusual exception as far as I can tell. It seems to have been much more common for commuter lines to be in the 30–60 range.

Anecdotally, it had felt when Northstar opened that a lot of people got burned by early experiences with heavy crowds and decided not to return, at least not for a long time. I think there was a lot of demand for the line that went unfulfilled.

2,600 people per day might not sound like much, but that translates to 217 people per train (with a median a bit higher since the reverse trips were usually quiet). You'd basically need a bus every 5 minutes or better to match the capacity of the old Northstar schedule.

I've been surprised to see that the study only estimated the cost of extending Northstar to St. Cloud to be in the $36 to $67 million range, a small fraction of the $320 million it originally cost to build (or around $475 million adjusted for inflation). That's the equivalent of a few apartment buildings with several hundred units total, and yet the train has spurred the creation of more than 3,200 housing units already.

Northstar has always had a noose around its neck from the politicians who've hated it from the beginning. They like to rag on its high subsidy per passenger, but that's driven almost entirely by the high operating costs to begin with, and the length of the trips (per passenger-mile, Northstar has subsidies somewhat higher than light rail, but much lower than urban buses). The limited schedule meant that the trains were under-utilized, leading to high overheads that can't be spread out easily. While it's likely inflated by the needs of the congested BNSF corridor the service runs on, the overall subsidy to Northstar is pretty small. The way it gets divided up among so few trains and the suppressed passenger levels just makes it look a lot worse.

The train is fine—it's doing as well or better than anyone could have expected considering its constraints. It was opened with unrealistic expectations. The right thing to do is to invest in it and turn it into the service its true supporters always meant it to be.

Passengers unloading at Target Field on June 4, 2024. People streamed out of the station for several minutes, with part of the crowd filling a Green Line train that arrived shortly after, and a steady line of others walking to their destinations

Congestion point: Columbus, WI

The Amtrak station building in Columbus, Wisconsin. From Wikimedia user Downspec, CC-BY-SA

I had a nice little trip on Amtrak's Borealis this past Saturday, May 25th, which allowed me to visit Winona for a few hours. My trip down was smooth, though I got a bit frustrated by delays on the way back. It turns out that my trip to Winona was on the best-performing Borealis train trip so far, and the only one to arrive in Chicago with zero delay up til now. However, my trip back ended up arriving 40 minutes late. I'll take a look at what may be going on with the eastbound/southbound train no. 1340 in the future, but for now I'd like to take a look at one of the likely reasons why my return trip, the westbound/northbound train no. 1333, picked up so much delay.

I included this chart in my previous post welcoming the beginning of Borealis operation. It's a stringline diagram, showing the approximate scheduled location of each train on a particular corridor over time. What I'd like to focus on in this post is the first crossing point of the longer lines, which occurs near the "CBS" horizontal line representing Columbus station in Wisconsin.

That point in the graph shows where and when the eastbound Empire Builder, train no. 8, is intended to meet the westbound Borealis, train no. 1333. Train 8 is scheduled to depart St. Paul at 8:50 am, leave Columbus at 1:47 pm, and continue on to arrive in Chicago at 4:45 pm. Train 1333 is scheduled to depart Chicago at 11:05 am, leave Columbus at 1:41 pm, and reach St. Paul at 6:29 pm.

The difference of just 6 minutes between the schedule of these two trains will mean that they will often both want to be at Columbus station at the same time, or at least in very close proximity. If they're both running exactly on time, they should run headlong into each other just west of town.

The good news is that there is double-track in Columbus, which should allow the two trains to pass each other. Google Streetview even shows two platforms at the station, though they are in poor condition according to this imagery from 2021.

Google Streetview image of the Columbus station platforms and tracks, with a simple wire fence between them

However, looking through location history of trains that have run so far, the westbound Borealis is frequently getting stuck at a point east of Columbus, halfway between Astico and Reeseville, waiting for the Empire Builder or other trains to pass. This is one of the most obvious places causing delay for westbound trains, a slowdown which is proving hard for trains to recover from as they make their way to St. Paul.

Borealis trains are racking up significant delays between Milwaukee and Columbus

So, what's going on here?

Well, first off, I'm hoping this is just a temporary situation. Columbus is one of Amtrak's many stations that are undergoing construction to upgrade platforms, walkways, and other parts of the station area to current ADA standards. Work is expected to be completed in Amtrak's next fiscal year, meaning sometime after October 1st. While this won't provide high platforms like those present in many East Coast cities, they will be raised up several inches and will get yellow tactile pavers like what we're accustomed to at urban rail and enhanced bus stops.

Based on video from news outlets and YouTube channels such as Trains Are Awesome, where Thom visited Columbus for an afternoon, it looks like only one of the two platforms is currently able to be used.

Okay, so one track is out of commission for passenger service. That shouldn't be such a big deal, right? The trains can just cross over to the other track somewhere nearby, right?

Well, no, unfortunately.

The map above shows the area of double- and single-tracking near Columbus (zoom in to see the track hidden by the icons). Double-tracked sections are shown in an orange-yellow color, and single-tracked sections are shown in dark red. I've included green "X" icons showing where switches are located, and stoplight icons indicate ends of signal blocks, generally spaced about 2 miles apart. Columbus is in a long stretch of about 23 miles of double-tracking, but unfortunately, the nearest crossing between those tracks is about 6 miles east of the city, which is where the westbound Borealis is often getting stuck.

Critically, that crossover point is on the opposite side of town from where the Empire Builder and Borealis are scheduled to meet each other. West of the station, there aren't any real crossing points that can be used in this situation. The double-track section begins around 7 miles west of town, but that only provides the eastbound trains the option of going on the track with the out-of-service platform. Combined with the nearly 11-mile single-track stretch running from near Doylestown west to Wyocena, that effectively creates a 24-mile single-track section for passenger trains (from Wyocena through Columbus to the crossover between Astico and Reeseville).

That distance really closely corresponds to the delays the no. 1333 trains have been experiencing.  Pretty wild that a 400-foot stretch of missing pavement can have such an effect—get delayed by 15 minutes or so getting to Columbus as the track clears, only to arrive late to the congested east Twin Cities region, and get delayed even further due to missed windows.

Well, I'm taking a bit of a leap in assuming that's what's going on, but it seems to be the simplest explanation. I hope the station construction can be accelerated, at least enough to get both platforms usable.

I'm not sure how the train crews will the different groups of riders, especially since Columbus hasn't had a station attendant since 2017—it would probably make sense for this station to be staffed, just since someone should be around to shepherd people around to the right places before the trains show up. They're long enough to block the nearby crossings while boarding and disembarking happens, so it's really important for passengers to be in the right spots ahead of time. The station has had a simple fence between the tracks since 2016, so it appears that passengers have to walk down to Ludington Street just east of the station to cross over to the other side.

A more robust solution would be to add crossover tracks west of the station, to allow trains to switch tracks much closer to the stop and at a point that naturally aligns with the schedule. It would mean that only one platform would need to be used, and would also help reduce the chance that a late Empire Builder would induce even greater delays. There is a set of block signals about half a mile away from the station past Lewis Street that would probably be an ideal spot to add switches.

There are track improvements planned in La Crosse, La Crescent, and Winona that are supposed to help the Borealis and any future added service operate more smoothly. Perhaps that will shift the schedules a bit too. If those changes allow the Empire Builder to consistently arrive a several minutes earlier, that would shift the meeting point east of Columbus station and reduce the need for any track changes there.

Of course, a lot of this trouble would be eliminated if we could get a commitment to converting much more of the whole route to double-tracking. The single-track corridors that dominate rail in the U.S. definitely make it much harder to add new passenger service here vs. what's possible in Europe and elsewhere. That flexibility would be priceless.

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

Another try at passenger service to Madison

The Wisconsin State Journal reports on another study for linking Madison with Amtrak, with a selection process beginning that is examining six possible station locations. This of course comes a dozen years after the old high(er)-speed rail plan for connecting Madison to Milwaukee and Chicago was killed off at the end of Jim Doyle's term as governor, just prior to Scott Walker taking office following the 2010 elections.

Four of the six options are on the east side of the city, which are likely the most practical since they could potentially allow through-running on existing tracks to the Twin Cities that would still mostly follow the existing Amtrak Empire Builder route. Running through on the Madison isthmus would require either continuing west along the Wisconsin River corridor to Prairie du Chien (south of Amtrak's current routing) and north along the Mississippi, or building a connection west of Madison to turn north and rejoin the Canadian Pacific tracks Amtrak uses.

This appears to be a study being led by the City of Madison rather than WisDOT, and it doesn't seem to be tied to any actual plans for new train service. Instead, this looks like it's just to ensure the city has good plans in place if and when a rail service initiative actually happens, such as one using funding from the recent federal infrastructure bill. (Map from the city's site.)