MADISON – As President Biden heads to Westby to discuss new grant money for rural energy projects, in Madison Thursday discussion centered around the idea of federal dollars being utilized to grow Wisconsin’s passenger rail network to the state capitol.
As part of the Milwaukee+Madison Downtown Exchange series, a panel of rail transportation experts explored the idea of extending the already-existing Hiawatha line to Madison. The route currently runs 11 round-trip trains a week between Milwaukee and Chicago with three stops in between.
Part of the process includes choosing a site for a new Amtrak station in Madison. Eight possible locations are being explored, with Madison Downtown Inc. officially endorsing the Monona Terrace site near the state capitol:
When it comes to getting a project like this started, Amtrak Director of Network Development Arum Rao says the process can take longer than many people realize.
“It’s a bit of a journey” said Rao Thursday. “Seven to eight years for a lot of these corridors, in some case it’s going to be longer than that, in some cases it’s shorter…we think the Madison corridor to take shorter than that due to a number of factors”.
Madison senior transportation manager Liz Callan says while the project remains purely hypothetical at the moment, as state funding would need to match any federal investment for the project to come to fruition, she believes an aggressive timeline for the start of service could be the early 2030s.
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Rao says the Midwest is being heavily targeted by the Corridor ID plan for future rail projects, as evidenced by the recently opened Borealis line running across Wisconsin between the Twin Cities and Chicago. The latest data from Amtrak indicates the Borealis has already serviced over 47,000 trips since opening in May, 15 percent higher than expectations.
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