WI: Wilson Street chosen as preferred location for Madison Amtrak station

Picture this: A passenger train chugs into Downtown Madison. The train stops at a station that opens onto Wilson Street, where it drops off a mix of locals and tourists and picks up a new batch of passengers bound for Milwaukee or the Twin Cities. It’s one of several trains to visit the station every day.

Regular train service could become a reality in the 2030s if factors beyond Madison’s control fall into place, according to a draft study by the city’s Department of Transportation.

Nearly two years have passed since the city announced a shortlist of eight potential Amtrak station locations: Monona Terrace, Blair Street, Livingston Street, Baldwin Street, First Street, Johnson Street, Commercial Avenue and Aberg Avenue.

The study released this month doesn’t pinpoint exact sites but highlights stretches of existing railroad tracks where the city would prefer to see a station built.

It identifies the area near East Johnson and North First streets, next to the soon-to-open Madison Public Market on the East Side, as the city’s second choice if the Monona lakefront’s space constraints prove too big a challenge. And it keeps the rail corridors between Blair and Paterson streets on the Near East Side and through the UW-Madison campus on the Near West Side as “reserve” options.

Whether Amtrak comes back to Madison is up to the Wisconsin Department of Transportation and Amtrak, not the city, said Christof Spieler, Madison’s director of transportation.

The DOT is leading a separate passenger rail planning effort for a corridor that includes Madison, and Amtrak has shown interest in expanding service to the city.

Madison has waited 50 years for trains to return to the city. Will it happen?

Since 1971, Madison has appeared close to getting its own Amtrak station. Again and again, those plans fizzled out.

A Madison station could open around 2032 with service to Milwaukee if work continues to progress, according to a timeline in the city’s study. But that timing is tentative and dependent on federal and state money that hasn’t been allocated yet, as well as Amtrak’s plans, Spieler said.

If passenger trains do come back, Spieler said, “We want to be prepared with our recommendations for where we think the best station sites are.”

Plan A: Monona lakefront

An Amtrak station with its main entrance on Wilson Street would be within walking distance of Monona Terrace, Capitol Square and many other Downtown destinations and close to Bus Rapid Transit, bike paths and city-owned parking, the study says.

“What we concluded was that a Downtown station really does the best in terms of getting people to Madison,” Spieler said.

The station would also be able to capitalize on the extensive improvements planned as part of the Madison LakeWay project, which seeks to bridge the separation between Downtown and 1.7 hard-to-reach miles of the Lake Monona shoreline and add a host of new public spaces and attractions.

The downside is that the area is “somewhat tight,” Spieler said. “We believe there is more than enough room for a station track, but ... there is a space limitation down there.”

Having the entrance on Wilson Street would be another challenge, since the trains would run along John Nolen Drive, which sits at a lower elevation. But a Wilson Street entrance would be much more accessible than an entrance facing Lake Monona, Spieler said.

It will take more analysis to determine precisely where a station can go, he said.

Developer Brandon Cook demolished the longtime Red Caboose Child Care Center to make way for a five-story, 53-unit apartment building with ground-floor retail space.

Plan B: Johnson and First streets

The city’s backup plan is the “Johnson Street Yard” area, located where East Johnson Street meets North First Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. The area is across the street from the Madison Public Market and not far from East Washington Avenue and BRT Route A.

It has “a relatively large amount of space,” Spieler said, “so there’s more room for tracks, there’s more room for platforms and there’s probably less difficulty in building those tracks and platforms.”

But the location isn’t as central as the Monona lakefront and has less within walking distance, Spieler said.

The study notes that having the station on the East Side would also be more inconvenient for many prospective passengers, including students.

It recommends that the city “focus on pursuing its top station site area ... while keeping the Johnson Street Yard site area as flexible as possible for further site development.”

Two other locations aren’t being ruled out.

The area between Blair and Paterson streets is walkable and close to transit but “would require trade-offs, including impacts to street and multimodal connections and access for utility operations,” according to the study.

And the UW-Madison campus, which didn’t make the city’s shortlist in early 2024, “has high ridership potential, but faces major constraints,” including limited land availability and access issues, though it could work as a “secondary station” with service to special events like Badgers football games, the study says.

The study dismisses the rest of the sites, concluding they are too far from parts of the city that are walkable with sufficient access to transit, or they are too small to support a station with a 700-foot-long platform.

The long wait

Madison has seemed close to finally getting its own Amtrak station many times over the past few decades. Efforts to bring back passenger trains fell short in the early 1990s and again in the early 2000s due to the cost.

In the early 2010s, the state was in line to receive $810 million in federal funding for a Madison-to- Milwaukee passenger rail project. Madison’s leaders at the time envisioned a $12 million station on East Wilson Street.

But then-Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican, rejected the funds, and the project went nowhere.

A decade later, in 2021, Amtrak included service to Madison in its vision for 2035. In 2022, the city kicked off its site selection in process. And in 2023, a Madison-to-Milwaukee Amtrak route was one of five in Wisconsin awarded a $500,000 federal planning grant by the Biden administration through the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Railroad Administration’s Corridor Identification and Development program.

The DOT is leading the Madison-to- Milwaukee planning effort. It’s currently finishing the first of three steps in the study, which requires a separate federal grant agreement for each step and some local funding for the second and third steps, according to the study.

Station site selection comes toward the end of the planning process, the study says, while final design and construction are funded through another program.

Initial service from Madison would be to Milwaukee, “with a later phase connecting Madison to Minneapolis/St. Paul,” the study says. A route to Chicago, through Janesville, is also a possibility.

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