Thrown down the
train? Or drain?
Joking aside...ok, seeing mention of yet another bullet train makes me want to hit my head against the keyboard. I'd do that, but I might accidentally write
Twilight. Seriously, misplaced bullet train (or in their case, maglev) hopes basically kept Tennessee from studying a Chattanooga-Atlanta corridor train. That said, the link is dead...but this does seem like a market worth seriously looking at (especially in light of Minnesota's NLX project from Minneapolis to Duluth). The market was almost assuredly over-served in the late 60s/early 70s with something like 9 trains per day on three roads, but given the amount of traffic that MSP is generating with one train per day, they probably need the second train in the long run if they don't want to start dropping lots of cars in Minneapolis from the Builder.
Moreover, while CHI-MSP is a reasonably reliable run on the Builder, MSP-CHI is a farce because of all the trouble the Builder can run into over the first 2000 or so miles of its trip.
Edit: Seeing as MN is pretty interested in rail stuff, I'm wondering if they might not just find a way to steamroll the train through WI if the estimated deficit is small enough (<$5 million a year seems like something that MN might be able and willing to come up with, and I could see one train per day having costs in this range...particularly if it was able to transfer at least
some CHI-MSP business from the Builder; I think you'd see a substantial increase in traffic on the corridor with an additional train, but at least eastbound I think this would pull a
lot of business over from the Builder).
Edit 2: At least with the higher-speed project, it looks like they might be able to beat out the old "400" times by at least some margin.