Amtrak: Empire Builder and Borealis (TCMC)

[Silophant]

Wonder what the Sioux Falls routing would be? Might be easiest to stay on BNSF tracks the whole way via Willmar and Marshall, but I'd think they'd get more ridership going via Mankato, if the various tracks are in good enough shape.

[Silophant]

Here's the letter that MnDOT sent to the FRA officially expressing interest in the Corridor Identification program. The corridors on the list are:
- NLX, of course.
- TCMC, including extending the upcoming initial TCMC round trip to Minneapolis, adding an additional round trip along the existing route, adding a route via Eau Claire, and routing some or all of these through Madison.
- Twin Cities-Des Moines-Kansas City.
- Restoration of the North Coast Hiawatha long-haul train.
- Twin Cities to Fargo, and eventually to Winnipeg, apparently as a separate service from TCMC. Which is probably a better bet for getting daytime service to Fargo/Grand Forks anyway.
- Twin Cities to Sioux Falls.
- Twin Cities to Sioux City, via Le Mars.

[Korh]

Likely to happen soon:
-TCMC

Might happen in a few years:
-NLX
-Twin Cities to Fargo

Probably will only happen in +10 years:
-Twin Cities to Sioux Falls.
-TCMC route through Eau Claire

Better suited to the fantasy map thread:
-Twin Cities-Des Moines-Kansas City.
-North Coast Hiawatha
-Winnipeg extention
-

[grant1simons2]

Amazing how lines that used to run multiple times daily are now just fantasy. Especially with Gen Z hating driving more than any other generation in the past 50 years. But that's fine, we can keep living in denial while other countries kick ass in rail infrastructure.

[Korh]

I call some of them fantasy because that's what some of them are under the current state and federal administrations as well as kind of inflate the influence the twin cities has as a region.
I'm not betting in states like Iowa, Montana, or North Dakota playing ball to get things like the north coast Hiawatha and what every you would call the train to Kansas City unless there's heavy subsidies involved since there's even less political will and demand then even here.
And a lot of these seem to hinge on MSP being the second Chicago of the midwest and having just as much pull, which sad to say will never happen, even with some people starting rumors of massive mega projects...

Point is unless the state booms in population and has good political will for the next decade or two, I'd be willing to bet on zip rail happening before some of these proposals.

[DanPatchToget]

Likely to happen soon:
-TCMC

Might happen in a few years:
-NLX
-Twin Cities to Fargo

Probably will only happen in +10 years:
-Twin Cities to Sioux Falls.
-TCMC route through Eau Claire

Better suited to the fantasy map thread:
-Twin Cities-Des Moines-Kansas City.
-North Coast Hiawatha
-Winnipeg extention
-

If that's the best we can hope for then I honestly have no faith in our state having a passenger rail system that's at least close to the standards of the rest of the western world.

All of those routes have at least decent public support, it's just a matter of getting politicians off their butts and making it happen, and by that I mean more than just endless studies that end up on a shelf collecting dust.

If we were talking bullet trains on all of these routes then yeah it's fantasy territory (except maybe MSP-Rochester-Madison-Milwaukee-CHI), but at least a few trains per day on these routes (besides one daily on the North Coast Hiawatha) should be considered logical, not fantasy.

[grant1simons2]

And a lot of these seem to hinge on MSP being the second Chicago of the midwest and having just as much pull, which sad to say will never happen, even with some people starting rumors of massive mega projects...

In terms of the Midwest, we already are on pace to become that. We're the fastest growing metro since 2010, and we lead the charts in flight/rail connections to Chicago. We had a train to Winnipeg for 63 years, I just don't get how it's suddenly fantasy when populations are growing and the demand for rail travel is stronger than ever. I get the political will argument, but NoDak actually has been pretty good about passenger rail in recent years, especially with oil dropping off.

[Korh]

Yes we may be the fastest growing but what about the other regions for a the proposed lines? How much traffic is betweens the corridor and if there's a lot of air traffic are people flying to MSP as a destination or because it's a major transfer hub for delta.
And there's also Amtrak which a) seems to be focusing more on short haul state routes over long-distance ones and b) is completely centered around Chicago as its Midwest focus point (when nlx gets started there will be 2 routes that don't end there)

With regards to Winnipeg there's a few reasons why I say it's highly unlikely
Both the US and Canada to work together which given how long the two takes to build a single bridge connection them could mean years.
Winnipeg is a hell of a lot more car centric than the twin cities and needs to improve it's regional transit and intercity trains inside Canada first before adding a inter country rail.
I will bet money on Amtrak and via pushing to revive the international between Chicago and Toronto if people want another connection between the countries.

It sucks that some things we had a handful of decades ago is all but lost today, I personally wish we still had the twin star rocket since it would of made it a lot easier to keep in touch with family in Texas, but I'm not gonna cry over spilled milk about it or argue diverting money better suited to say getting more and faster trains to Chicago to study if it's possible to get back.

[VacantLuxuries]

which given how long the two takes to build a single bridge connection them could mean years.

Is this a regular problem, or is this just the battle in Detroit between US/CA and the privately owned Ambassador Bridge being extrapolated into something it isn't?

Also while I'd also like to see faster trains sometime this century, I think the approach of making any sort of train travel useful to many more people is a way to build the groundswell of support needed to get the political capital for higher speed investments.

[MNdible]

In terms of utility, don't sleep on the Kansas City train, because if timed correctly, that would allow connections to the California Zephyr and the Southwest Chief without having to connect through Chicago.

[VacantLuxuries]

Exactly. TC-KC is the route I'm most excited about, and was pretty thrilled/surprised to see that even MN Senate Republicans recognize the value in it. Hopefully Union Pacific is open to the idea.

[grant1simons2]

KC is becoming an epicenter of industrial jobs and distribution. We either start more flights there, or get some tracks blasting down 35.

150 mph averages over 450 miles sounds like a dream. About 4 hours of rail travel is way better than a 2 hour flight with security theater.

[Trademark]

I would be shocked if any of those train lines mentioned got speeds of over 110 in their implementation. Likely It will probably be caped at 90 mph like NLX.

I do think that if a KC line ends up happening interlining it with NLX makes sense

[grant1simons2]

150 mph is what Acela hits. It's also what numerous trains in Europe/Asia and soon to be Africa are managing to already consistently do. MSP to KC is some of the flattest land in the county. We can't have trains go those speeds in 2035? We're getting screwed over pretty hard in this country by our slow pace of progress to reconnect our cities by rail.

Just for everyone's awareness:

[luigipaladio]

A perennial passenger rail topic in Colorado is a Front Range Express that would connect all of the major towns and cities of the Front Range. There already is a well traveled rail corridor connecting those cities, and at least one of the proposals was to convert the existing corridor to passenger rail because it runs right through the downtowns of most of the Front Range cities. The plan was to build a new rail corridor farther out on the prairies running parallel to the rail corridor but dedicated to freight. That proposal was floated there twenty years ago, but there was a tremendous amount of resistance from farmers and ranchers along the freight route, and a surprising amount of sniping from NIMBYs not wanting passenger service running through their neighborhoods - even though coal trains and other freight run the lines endlessly every day. In any case, the project does not seem to be moving very quickly in any direction. A high speed link between Denver and Colorado Springs, and perhaps Pueblo and to some of the larger communities north of Denver would make a lot of sense, but despite a willingness to dump tons of money into light rail in Denver, the urge to build passenger service beyond that area seems pretty limited. It's not unlike our inability to get anything going between the Twin Cities and Rochester and the slow pace of the NLX - and it's relatively low speeds.

[Tom H.]

The bad news is that so much of the resistance to HSR / rail travel in general is due to endemic cultural and "travel preference" concepts deeply embedded into Americans' brains.

The good news is that, if the Overton window of that conversation starts to shift - due to climate change awareness, energy prices, younger generation preference changes - I think one could see significant movement in political will in a relatively short time. Rail transport has almost become another culture war issue, and those can definitely have non-linear profiles in terms of advancement of public opinion (see gay marriage, etc.). It's almost like a ketchup bottle - "first none'll come, then a lot'll"

[MNdible]

I'm not super optimistic that we'll see a rapid build-up of rail service in the Midwest -- at the end of the day, I honestly remain skeptical that it will pencil out on most of these routes given distances and populations. That said, passenger rail service can make for strange political bedfellows. See, for example, all of the Republicans who support the Empire Builder because it's the only transportation option for many of their constituencies.

[Tcmetro]

It seems to me that the intra-state corridors will have the most political support. The big problem in the Midwest is that there isn't a good bloc of passenger-rail friendly states. If MN, WI, IL, IN, MI, and OH had the same level of support a pretty good network could be put together.

Winnipeg seems like the longest shot in the rail network. The border crossing requires a lot of support, and I believe it's the only city on Grant's list that doesn't have an intercity bus connection from Minneapolis currently.

[Silophant]

I'm not super optimistic that we'll see a rapid build-up of rail service in the Midwest -- at the end of the day, I honestly remain skeptical that it will pencil out on most of these routes given distances and populations. That said, passenger rail service can make for strange political bedfellows. See, for example, all of the Republicans who support the Empire Builder because it's the only transportation option for many of their constituencies.

I'm fairly optimistic about the North Coast Hiawatha eventually getting moving for that reason as well, though I think the bigger hangup there is that there's no spare Superliner equipment to run it until (unless?) Amtrak starts getting a new generation of long-distance railcars.

[Nick]

I thought this made a lot of sense:

https://www.slowboring.com/p/amtrak-sho ... good-train