SMALL BEGINNINGS.

There's the beginnings of a commuter rail service along the old joint Great Northern and Northern Pacific Elk River Line.  Trains run, mostly on a conventional rush-hour schedule, between Big Lake and a Minneapolis station not far from the old Great Northern grand station that vanished in the middle 1970s.

That's a morning train, just arrived.  Most laid-back commuter train I've ever seen.  Train pulls into Minneapolis and probably half the passengers on the upper deck just sat there.  I will confess to getting a bit antsy, even though I let the Chicago mob detrain before I leave my seat, that's usually a wait of two or three minutes.  In the distance, the Union Pacific and BNSF paired tracks.

The seating imitates the pattern German regional trains use, with the seats fixed in groups of four, and tables provided in some groups.  For now, the tables support electronic devices, rather than pinochle games.

The commuter station is below street level; upstairs is the terminus of the two light rail lines, and the gates to Target Field, where the Twins play.  The two light rail lines stay together through central Minneapolis to the new Vikings stadium, where one route goes to the Mall of America and the other to St. Paul and the once-again rail station in the Union Depot complex.

I saw a preserved Grain Belt Beer sign along the river, but the stadium gets beer from Wisconsin.

That's a three-car light rail train at the Capitol Hill stop in St. Paul.  There's enough content inside the Capitol to provoke yet another post.

Didn't see any Hamm's beer signs, but note who else is selling at the baseball stadium.  This is an afternoon train loading for Big Lake.  A passenger I chatted with noted that the long gestation of the train was "typical Minnesota."  Usual practice is these four car rakes, but with the traffic I observed on all the highways in the area, the appeal of a commuter train might grow.

End of the line is Big Lake, with a connecting bus as far as St. Cloud.  These tracks also carry Amtrak's Empire Builder, which in its current incarnation deviates from its traditional Great Northern routing all the way to Minot (Chicago to St. Paul on The Milwaukee Road, St. Paul to Fargo-Moorhead on the old Northern Pacific, Fargo to Minot via Grand Forks and Devil's Lake rather than the Surrey Cutoff.) Upon my return, I did some research on the pre-Amtrak Minnesota and North Dakota service: until the Burlington Northern merger, there was quite the network of regional trains making it possible for passengers as far west as Great Falls, Montana, to reach anywhere in North Dakota or much of the 94th latitude of Minnesota, and to connect to Chicago.

Unfortunately, it's because I can refer to the 94th latitude of Minnesota that there isn't much by way of rail or bus service in that part of the world, but the Empire Builder as we understand it can't function as both the cruise train and the regional train.