Hope for Madison to Ride the Rails

It was announced today that former mayor of South Bend, Indiana and presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg is to be Joe Biden's nominee for the U.S. Secretary of Transportation. During his bid for president, he had a big budget infrastructure improvement plan that called "for robust public transportation improvements". Part of that plan was for rail but the article notes "Buttigieg mentions pursuing high-speed rail, but doesn’t lay out how much he’d spend."

President-Elect Biden is a self-professed fan of Amtrak and the infrastructure plan he promoted on the campaign trail had a large rail component.

Biden is still a believer in a coast-to-coast, high-speed rail network, despite seeing Obama‘s ambitious “vision” for a nationwide, high-speed rail network sputter: Florida and Wisconsin rejected federal high-speed rail grants; and California’s high-speed rail program has become a political punching bag and a money pit. Biden’s plan aims to cut travel time between Washington, D.C., and New York City by half, rebuild the Hudson River Tunnel, expand the Northeast Corridor southward, keep plugging away in California and jump-start high-speed rail networks in the Midwest and West.

As the Wisconsin Public Radio podcast Derailed noted, then Wisconsin Secretary of Transportation Frank Busalacchi chatted with Biden in 2008 while the aspiring Vice-Presidential nominee was in Cudahy. 

After the meeting, both men headed to a room full of firefighters where Biden was set to give a stump speech in front of a parked fire truck.

During the speech, Biden went off script. 

"Frank I promise you," Biden said. "When we get elected, you're going to have passenger rail coming through the Midwest like it never came before. I'm serious. It's coming.”

And two years later, the money for it was on offer. Of course, Scott Walker led the charge to turn down the funding and was highly successful.

Madison once had passenger rail service and I thought that, after Walker and his cronies rejected the funding to extend the Hiawatha line to Madison, I would never live to see it here. But with Biden's election, there may just be an outside slim hope of a chance that Madison may yet have passenger trains connecting it to Milwaukee and Chicago.