Federal money will allow Wisconsin to rebuild Amtrak's lines

Daily Reporter (Milwaukee), Oct 2, 2008 by Sean Ryan

Amtrak's Hiawatha line struggles to stay on schedule because trains slow down whenever they hit patches of old rail between Milwaukee and Chicago.

There is a little less than 18 miles of old track between Milwaukee and the Illinois state line that still have joints with brackets holding together lengths of rail. In those patches, the passenger train speed limit drops from 79 mph to 70 mph or less.

The modern rail design, which requires less maintenance and allows for faster speeds, features welded rails that form a continuous line.

The U.S. Department of Transportation will give the state $5 million to rebuild the last patches of jointed line and shave 1.7 minutes from travel times.

"If there's a delay elsewhere, that will help us get a little ahead of schedule and get a little more cushion," said Amtrak spokesman Marc Magliari. "It just better enables us to have a better chance of staying on time."

Ridership on the Hiawatha line increased by 25 percent, from 547,143 to 685,672, between October 2007 and August 2008, compared to the same time in the previous year, Magliari said.

Canadian Pacific Railway owns the track that Amtrak uses, and, over the years, CPR rebuilt most of the stretch to replace jointed track with welded track, said Ron Adams, chief of the Wisconsin Department of Transportation's railroads and harbors section. He said CPR will kick in $5 million to match the federal money for the project, and the railway will manage the project.

The jointed rails require more maintenance work, which slows trains, Adams said. The U.S. DOT calculated that eliminating the maintenance would save four minutes for every 1,000 miles of travel on the jointed track.

"We're not going to change the schedule," Adams said, "but it'll provide the cushions."

The improvements won't have a big effect on freight train schedules, but by speeding up Amtrak trains, it'll make it easier to coordinate freight and passenger schedules, said CPR spokesman Jeff Johnson.

The improvements are necessary if high-speed passenger trains running at more than 100 mph are ever used between Milwaukee and Chicago, Adams said.

"Ultimately it does (help)," he said. "It's less work that will need to be done when there's a federal program that will allow us to move forward with high-speed rail."