FREQUENCY, DEPENDABILITY, AND RELIABILITY.

Whether or not the Democrats' spending spree comes to pass, there are people making plans for what to do with the money, once it's appropriated.  (Yes, everybody who buys a Power Ball ticket makes the same sort of plans.)  There's a lengthy Midwest Regional Rail wish list out. and it notes the paucity of trains on the ground, something that other observers of Passenger Rail have also drawn attention to.

The background for all three events can be found on Amtrak’s map of the Midwest, which has not changed much since the 1970s and early 1980s, at least as far as routes are concerned. There are more trains on most of the routes today than there were decades ago, but the lines on the map have changed little over the decades. Corridors radiating from Chicago to St. Louis, Milwaukee, Detroit, and Carbondale, Ill. formed the basic network. Illinois sponsors two round trips between Chicago and Quincy, which started more recently, although there were once trains to places like Peoria and Decatur that no longer run. There are also trains across Missouri, between St. Louis and Kansas City. There is the Pere Marquette between Chicago and Grand Rapids, but there is no longer a Hoosier State between the Windy City and Indianapolis. The long-distance network radiating from Chicago has remained essentially unchanged since 1985. Today it is frozen by the Passenger Rail Investment & Improvement Act (PRIIA), which defines Amtrak’s “national network” as being limited to trains that ran in 2008.

But if you're fantasizing about spending Other Peoples' Money^(TM), you can draw a really ambitious map.

Federal Railroad Administration concept map retrieved from Railway Age.

Looks like some hoped-for faster running in several States, presumably involving new track construction.  The details of who pays for what matter, as some of the states are reluctant to participate in supporting passenger trains.

Illinois is the only Midwestern state that has developed more than one corridor. The Lincoln service between Chicago and St. Louis now has four daily round trips, plus the Texas Eagle. Only in 2006 was a third train added between Chicago and Carbondale (that count includes the one to New Orleans) and a second train added between Chicago and Quincy. Missouri has two trains between St. Louis and Kansas City, but reducing service to a single round trip has often been threatened and did occur during the COVID-19 pandemic. In Michigan, the Wolverine route has never had more than three round trips daily, and the Pere Marquette route to Grand Rapids has never had more than one since before the Amtrak era. In Wisconsin, the Chicago-Milwaukee trains keep running, but there has been no expansion north of there. Former Republican Gov. Scott Walker famously killed a plan that would have enhanced the Hiawatha route to Minnesota and re-route the trains to add Madison as a stop.

Elsewhere in the region, the picture has been even worse. In 2019, Indiana killed the Hoosier State, which provided service between Chicago and Indianapolis on the four days a week that the Cardinal does not run. Ohio almost had the long-awaited 3C+D corridor (which would have served Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati and Dayton), but former Republican Gov. John Kasich killed it about the same time Walker killed the Madison project. While the current governor, Republican Mike DeWine, is not as staunchly opposed to transit as Kasich was, it appears unlikely that he would fund the corridor terminated by his predecessor.

The High Speed Rail Alliance are more optimistic about the plan, although note that its success is not dependent on speed.

First, it lays out a compelling vision for an network of high-speed trains that would transform travel across the Midwest. Second, it makes a strong case for fast, frequent trains that are coordinated and well-integrated into a network. While speed gets most of the spotlight when people talk about trains, frequency and coordination are key to leveraging the full power of a rail network. Third, it points out the urgency of regional cooperation and big-picture planning.

The plan envisions a network that consists of of four “pillar corridors” radiating out from Chicago, with endpoints in Minneapolis-St. Paul, St. Louis, Indianapolis, and Detroit. These corridors are the system’s backbone. Their real power, though, isn’t that they would move people at high speeds from point to point within each corridor. Their power lies in the way they would make connections much faster and easier between hundreds of cities throughout the Midwest.

That’s because the “pillar corridors” would be integrated with transit systems and regional lines that connect mid-sized and major cities—like Indianapolis and Cincinnati, and Kansas City and St. Louis. There would be 24 trains per day on the “pillar”lines and 16 trains per day on the regional lines—a vast increase over current service levels on U.S. passenger trains.

They, too, are indulging in fantasies about holding the winning lottery ticket: see, for instance, their conception of a Chicago Union Station with the old Penn Station concourse grafted in.  But check out that 24 trains a day (does that refer to one per hour, day and night, or twelve pairs?) on the principal corridors.  They like that in the Twin Cities.

Currently, a single train — the Empire Builder — makes an eastbound and westbound stop at the St. Paul Union Depot as it travels between Chicago and the Pacific Northwest at speeds no faster than a typical car and often slower, given delays caused by competing freight traffic. Ramsey County officials received $31.8 million in federal funding last year for a second Chicago-bound train, the Twin Cities-Milwaukee-Chicago Second Train, which could roll out in 2024.

By way of comparison, here is the June 1954 service offered by the Burlington Route, Chicago and North Western, and The Milwaukee Road.

Click it to enlarge it.  I left out the Chicago Great Western, which missed most of the major population centers going the great way round through Oelwein, Iowa, and the Soo Line, which offered an overnight train to Duluth-Superior but its line through the Fox Cities of Wisconsin also got in the way of fast running.  Note that a train could call at Eau Claire or La Crosse but not both, and that a through train could go through Milwaukee or Madison, but serving both was slow.

The timetable alludes to service beyond the corridors.  One Milwaukee Road train pair through Madison, 11 and 22, was the Sioux with sleeping cars for and from the Dakotas, and the Chicago and North Western's 519 and 518 also carried sleeping cars for and from there.  All those early morning departures from St. Paul included the Empire Builder, North Coast Limited, and Olympian Hiawatha from the Pacific Northwest; those were still running as separate trains from Chicago.  In later years these were combined with Zephyrs or Hiawathas as an economy measure.  Northern Pacific's Mainstreeter was still a separate train east of St. Paul, but Great Northern's Western Star cars ran in Burlington's Black Hawk, and The Pioneer Limited carried the Columbian's Chicago sleepers.

The railroads paid attention to connectivity, note how Chicago and North Western's 400 and 518 connected at Wyeville so that passengers off the Rochester Line could get to Milwaukee or Twin Cities lines passengers could get to Madison.  On The Milwaukee Road, note how 58 allowed passengers from smaller towns to connect to the Afternoon Hiawatha or to get to Chicago more quickly by changing to Fourteen, the On Wisconsin from Madison.  (I left out the Wausau and points north service to keep the chart manageable.)

And yes, there were rivalries, note the eastbound Morning Hiawatha and Morning Zephyr both away from St. Paul (some stunt on the paired track as far as Hastings) and into Chicago at the same time.No doubt, somebody would sniff about wasteful and duplicative competition.

Under those schedules, there were sixteen or seventeen trains between St. Paul and Chicago, and some of those were of long-distance trains still long enough to rate their own schedule.  At no time, though, was there anything resembling a memory pattern on any of the railroads.