MILWAUKEE — AAA predicts Wisconsin is in store for one of its busiest Thanksgivings on record with more than a million people expected to travel in cars and planes over the long holiday weekend.
But Wisconsinites who prefer to take the train have a lot to look forward to in the new year as Amtrak is expected to launch a second daily route that will connect Chicago and Milwaukee to the Twin Cities.
For Maja Jurisic of Milwaukee, there’s no better way to travel than to take the train.
"It's relaxing, you can sit in comfort, you can get up, you can walk around,” she said. "You aren't confined like a sardine in a tin can like you are in planes. You see beautiful sights out the window usually."
This Thanksgiving weekend, Maja and her husband are off to Chicago. Next Spring, they plan to be among the first passengers to ride a new rail service across the state on Amtrak’s second daily round-trip passenger train to the Twin Cities that offers departure times from Milwaukee in both the morning and afternoon.
"There's enough population, there's enough interest, there's enough demand across this part of Wisconsin, the rest of Wisconsin, and up the Mississippi River to have more than one choice a day each way,” said Amtrak spokesman Marc Magliari.
Magliari says the new Amtrak train will complement their Empire Builder service which goes from Chicago through Milwaukee and St. Paul en route to the Pacific Northwest and back. But he says three timezones of travel often come with significant delays for the eastbound service. That problem is expected to be alleviated with a new train sticking to a 411-mile route from Chicago to St. Paul.
“How will this be a different experience than if someone were to take the Empire Builder today?” TMJ4 reporter Ben Jordan asked.
“The Empire Builder is an overnight train so it has sleeping cars on it and a formal dining car. This train will be very much like our Hiawatha trains today which are already very popular between Chicago and Milwaukee,” Magliari said.
Magliari says the Amtrak train travels at a top speed of 79 miles per hour with a travel time of 7.5 hours from start to finish. That’s about an hour longer than driving without making a single stop.
This Amtrak line has 13 stops along its route in places like La Crosse, Wisconsin Dells, and the small town of Columbus which is just northeast of Madison where we met Lisa Stern with the Wisconsin Department of Transportation.
“What will it mean for these smaller towns to have more tourism?” Jordan asked.
It’s not just tourism, it’s also an economic connection to the large cities like Milwaukee and Chicago and the Twin Cities,” Stern said. “It's connecting the families, the communities, and the economies of these towns."
In the first year, WisDOT predicts 124,200 extra passengers are expected to pass through small towns en route to three of the biggest cities in the Midwest with a majority of time spent traveling through the state of Wisconsin.
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