Extending the Lincoln Service St. Louis-Chicago train to Milwaukee

[OyCrumbler]

Originally Posted by PerseusVeil

My experience with the Lincoln Service being delayed typically involved a freight train that had priority. It's my understanding that Amtrak doesn't own the tracks, but that the freight companies do.

I'd be all for the expansion though. I wouldn't mind being able to take a train up to Milwaukee from St. Louis, especially once they finally get the "higher speed" cars going. It would likely take longer than driving though due to likely having to add stops in places like Waukegan, Kenosha, Racine, etc, in addition to Milwaukee as the terminus.

All of that being said, they do really need to fix the final approaches between St. Louis and Chicago first. In the St. Louis area, the train crawls between downtown and Alton, IL. If you're heading up to Chicago, you'll honestly save 45 minutes sometimes if you can just board at the Alton station. The same sort of slowdown happens once you hit the Joliet-Summit-Chicago section in Chicagoland.

Right, and the freight companies have an obligation to make sure they stick to their agreed upon schedules, but there's not much teeth for enforcement. The good news is that a lot of what the higher-speed rail project for St. Louis and Chicago has been is to upgrade portions of it to allow for more reliable service like adding additional track and passing sidings. Separately, but also impactful has been the ongoing CREATE program which is essentially a multi-agency omnibus project to reduce and eliminate rail bottlenecks in Chicagoland which has done a lot. These two programs are still ongoing and not yet finished, but played a large part in Lincoln Service over the last decade going from less than half of scheduled trains being on-time (and some of them really, really not on time) to about 86% on-time and with delays being less severe.

So with both these programs ongoing which would improve Lincoln Service reliability and travel time (to a near-term goal of a 4 hour ride for St. Louis-Chicago, so extending that out to Milwaukee over the Hiawatha route would mean 5 1/2 hours for St. Louis to Milwaukee which is what current Lincoln Service takes for the St. Louis to Chicago run), Chicago Union Station slated to undergo renovation and Wisconsin DOT willing to fund a ramp up of the service levels between Milwaukee and Chicago, then I think the most reasonable thing is to push for extending Lincoln Service to be St. Louis-Milwaukee via trains running through Chicago. It takes advantage of all the projects being done while both saving on operating costs and allows for more attractive ridership options.