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 […]
This post is months too late. The Metropolitan Council’s 2040 Transportation Policy Plan went through extensive design, writing, public comment period, and ultimately final adoption. Nevertheless, we can still hopefully improve upon corridors already decided on, help change priorities, et cetera. So, I present for your consideration a corridor that needs some major lovin’: Downtown Minneapolis-Uptown-Southdale. Streets.mn has […]
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 […]
An hour long Ramsey County production on the rebirth of the Union Depot. This full-length version of “Back on Track: The Rebirth of St. Paul’s Union Depot” chronicles the 23-month renovation journey as told in the voices of those who worked on the magnificent restoration of this multimodal transportation hub.
To the dismay of my four year old daughter, The Polar Express is no longer available on Netflix streaming so it’s not playing at a near constant loop at my house this time of year. The movie stretches the imagination of the possibilities of passenger train transportation. In this scene we see the Polar Express […]
Although freight trains move through Northfield daily, it’s been about 45 years since the last passenger trains stopped at the Northfield Depot. Now grassroots efforts to restore passenger rail from the Twin Cities to Northfield and points south are gathering steam. Even talking about taking the train to Northfield has been difficult. From 1910 until […]
If you hang around the Downtown East/ex-Metrodome Station for a few minutes while waiting for the train, you might begin to notice the advertising saturating the platform . It’s hard to miss, in part because it’s literally on every flat thing, and in part because it’s so incongruous, because it’s all about cars and suburban life. It […]
While at this point, we are almost assuredly beating a dead horse, until the Green Line Extension (Southwest LRT) is actually under construction, there remains the possibility it can be improved. While the best improvement (given the existence of an LRT to fourth ring Southwest suburbs) would be to route it along a path where […]
I’ve never ridden the Northstar line. But knowing what I know about it, I think it’s safe to say this house in Big Lake wasn’t expecting to see a train pull up a quarter-mile away, and its reaction is priceless.