Here is a map showing the route for trains that are expected to run from Minneapolis to Duluth once the Northern Lights Express project is completed. Like my previous map for Amtrak’s Empire Builder, this shows segments of single- and double-tracking (usually sidings) along the corridor. This highlights the places where trains may be able […]
Last week, Minnesota House representative Pat Garofalo (R-Farmington) issued a news release touting a compromise between him and supporters of the Zip Rail line being planned between the Twin Cities and Rochester. Oh good! Compromise! Our representatives must have done their job and avoided petty politics! That’s what we always want our representatives to do, […]
The Twin Cities region sits at the edge of the populous eastern third of the United States. There aren’t big million-plus metropolitan areas for long distances to the west, so when looking at plans for passenger rail expansion, there aren’t many obvious destinations. However, the lone intercity train to pass through Minnesota, the Empire Builder, is […]
Above is a map I put together late last year showing the route of Amtrak’s Empire Builder in a way I hadn’t seen before. I followed aerial imagery from Chicago to the Pacific Northwest, using different colors to mark out which parts of the route are single-track (red) and which parts have sidings or two or […]
Transit projects make for easy political targets because of high construction costs. They have prices in the many millions of dollars, and occasionally tip into the billions, which brings critics out of the woodwork. It’s difficult to know whether certain projects are justifiable or not, particularly because different modes of transportation concentrate and spread out […]
As the Green Line opened on June 14th, most of us were just excited to finally have a new service plying the busy Central Corridor area, but many were keeping an eye on their clocks and watches, checking its speed against the schedules that had been posted a couple of weeks earlier. On opening weekend, […]
On Wednesday, Metro Transit provided ridership figures for the Green Line’s second week of operation, including a station-by-station breakdown. They didn’t give specific ridership numbers for each station, but they did give percentages of the total to two decimal places, which is more than enough for us to pretend that they did. The line had […]
If you grew up in Minnesota, you may have heard the story of Saint Paul’s narrow streets—In downtown, the streets were so tight that the city eventually decided to shave off the fronts of buildings downtown, in order to make the streets wider. Today, however, many of downtown Saint Paul’s streets are too wide, or […]
Following my post last week, Bill Lindeke posted a comment which he summed up as, “What is the theoretical shortest possible run time for the Green Line?” That’s a really good question, since it sets a guidepost for what can realistically be achieved from changing signal timing along the route, and helps us to understand […]
Yesterday evening, I boarded a route 50 bus at Minnesota and 6th Street in downtown Saint Paul at 4:43 p.m. and rode it to the University of Minnesota campus, getting off at Oak Street and Washington Avenue. That was at 5:29 p.m., or 46 minutes after I had boarded in Saint Paul. The bus still […]