IMPROVING THAT ANCHOR FOR THE CORRIDOR. The plans for upgrading downtown Milwaukee's Amtrak station and converting it into an "intermodal facility" (meaning one can walk from trackside to more buses) are now public, and work continues on planning suburban train service to lakeshore points south. The station upgrade is still no replacement for the Everett Street Depot. A Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel editorial that hails the upgrade alas takes an unnecessary swipe at Soviet train station design.

Almost anything would be an improvement on Milwaukee's downtown Amtrak station which, sad to say, looks like it would have been right at home in the old Soviet Union.

Truth to tell, old Joe Stalin would probably have exiled the designer to Kolyma for fifty years. Consider the current Novosibirsk station, which is one of the more ornate on the Trans-Siberian.

Image taken by Valentina and available at Virtual Tourist. Those are not New Orleans schoolbuses in the forecourt. The station design is a caricature of a single-driver steam locomotive.

The station that preceded it might have inspired the Boston and Maine's North Conway station.