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CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) – I will tell you a dirty little secret about the train station at Columbus, Wisconsin.
It’s currently the nearest train station to Madison, which is otherwise disconnected from Amtrak’s national route map. If someone from Madison wants to ride, they take a 28-miles bus ride to Columbus to connect with either the Empire Builder or the Borealis.
Here’s the secret. Since Columbus is served by only two trains, the ticket agent has a lot of time between trains. It’s a job that’s perfect for someone who likes to take long lunches or tends to not be around when they’re left unsupervised. I know this because once I needed to refund an unused Amtrak ticket. Columbus is the nearest station with an agent. I arrived when it was not train time… and the full-time agent was AWOL.
Well, soon Madison will be directly connected to the Amtrak network. No more bus to Columbus.
And, so far, our state has made the right choices about the new Badger State Express – the proposed, not yet officially, decided name. Madison city leaders decided, correctly, that their new train station must be downtown near the state capitol, not some remote location like the airport. Watertown and Pewaukee will get new stations; these are growing upscale communities that will feed their own passengers into the train network.
Currently Madison would be the end of the line. Trains would arrive at the new station near Manona Terrace and turn around, before heading back east to Milwaukee and Chicago. There you can connect to almost any train within the Amtrak network.
The bigger, better, and unaddressed issue about bringing trains back to Madison is offering additional service to the west, to Minneapolis. There is active track due west to LaCrose, but that would involve difficult (and expensive) negotiations with the freight railroads. They often demand new sidings to allow Amtrak trains to pass around freight trains. There is also a shorter section of freight track that heads north from Madison, and connects with the current route to Minneapolis at Portage and Wisconsin Dells. Those projects are for another day, and another funding cycle.
Chris Conley
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