A PROPER ANCHOR FOR A CORRIDOR? Amtrak's downtown Milwaukee passenger station is the last big-city train station to be built prior to Amtrak but it anticipates the cheap design of Amtrak's first new stations in Cincinnati, the Twin Cities, and St. Louis. Despite Amtrak's travails, the policy makers are considering improvements to the station to enable intercity buses to use it as well.

Here's what anchored the corridor before 1965. (Two photos by John Karlson.)

This is the east throat of the station in the fall of 1952. The railroad discovered some weaknesses in the clock tower and is removing the top. The clocks will be moved to the decorative arches lower in the tower. The diesels are a pair of Erie-Builts (available in O Scale from Atlas) and the pair of DL-109s, 14A and 14B.


And here is the west throat in the fall of 1940. Immediately behind the F-7 Baltic are several coaches, suggesting this is a corridor train, not a Hiawatha which would have a baggage car or one of the tap cars immediately behind the tender. This station was condemned for expansion of Milwaukee's freeways, but only the land behind the photographer was taken for a new roadway. The station site itself is now occupied by Wisconsin Electric's general offices, and the east throat remains vacant land.

A PROPER ANCHOR FOR A CORRIDOR. The editorial writers at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel are hailing, complete with a video, the rebuilding of the Union Passenger Station as an Intermodal Terminal. They continue to indulge in wishful thinking about the future.

If 110-mph train service is established to Madison, Chicago, the Twin Cities and Green Bay, those trains would stop at the station.

Regular readers know that my standard for the Chicago service begins at 75 minutes, Milwaukee to Chicago. Amtrak once asked the Postal Service to change the description of the Hiawatha Baltics on a commemorative postage stamp because general knowledge of a steam train capable of 125 mph speeds put the carrier in a bad light.

If the KRM Commuter Link is built, the station would be part of a line serving workers, students and shoppers from the southern suburbs, Racine, and Kenosha, where passengers could transfer to Chicago's Metra trains.

The benefits of that interconnectivity are not clear. South Siders and south suburban residents have the airport station, and Racine and Kenosha riders have a large paid parking lot at Sturtevant. What's the point of transferring to Metra and getting into Chicago not much faster than a Shore Line local on the North Shore Line got you there until the summer of 1955?