On May 18, 2026, Amtrak and its three state partners marked a milestone that would have seemed optimistic just a few years ago: the Borealis — the second daily train between St. Paul and Chicago via Milwaukee — had carried more than 416,000 passengers in its first two years of service. Zoom out to the full corridor, and the picture is even more striking: the Borealis, the Empire Builder, and the Hiawatha together moved nearly 1.8 million passengers in those two years, a 27% jump over the pre-Borealis baseline. For a region long accustomed to hearing that passenger rail was in permanent decline, those numbers land differently.
What produced them — and whether they can last — is a story worth understanding in detail.
What Is the Borealis?
The Borealis launched in mid-May 2024, filling the second slot in a corridor that had been served by a single daily round trip for decades. Its route covers roughly 410 miles in about eight hours each way, running from St. Paul's Union Depot to Chicago's Union Station via Milwaukee with intermediate stops at Red Wing, Winona, La Crosse, Tomah, Wisconsin Dells, Columbus, Milwaukee, Sturtevant, and Glenview.
The scenery along the Mississippi River between St. Paul and La Crosse is among the most visually arresting in American rail travel — bluffs dropping straight to the water, river towns dating to the nineteenth century — and Amtrak leaned into it from the start, branding the route with a regional identity that extended to the café car menu. Coach fares started at $41 each way at launch, with Business Class also available. The equipment is Amfleet II coaches from the 1970s and '80s, which come with free Wi-Fi and the accumulated patina of several decades of service.
Operationally, the train runs on tracks owned by CPKC (Canadian Pacific Kansas City) between St. Paul and Milwaukee, then transitions to Union Pacific and CN infrastructure into Chicago. Amtrak holds the operating contract but pays the host railroads for access — a structural detail that matters when it comes to on-time performance, as we'll get to.
The Borealis's state partners — MnDOT, WisDOT, and IDOT — provide the financial backbone for the route. That arrangement is the real story here.
The Numbers: A Corridor Transformed
In Amtrak's FY25 annual report — covering the first full year of Borealis service — the corridor posted a 227% year-over-year surge in ridership (against a partial FY24 baseline of just ~4–5 months of service since the mid-May 2024 launch, so this is not a steady-state growth rate), with the Borealis alone carrying nearly a quarter million riders in a single fiscal year. By the two-year anniversary in May 2026, the cumulative total had crossed 416,000.
MnDOT Commissioner Nancy Daubenberger didn't bury the lede: "We are so pleased the Borealis continues to operate at capacity."
"At capacity" is the phrase that should catch transit advocates' attention. This isn't a train running half-empty in hopes that ridership will eventually arrive. It's a train that filled seats faster than forecast and is now constrained by the equipment and infrastructure available, not by a lack of passengers.
For context, Amtrak set system-wide records in FY25 across nearly every metric: 34.5 million customer trips (up 5.1%), $2.7 billion in adjusted ticket revenue (a first in the agency's history, up 10.4%), and 6.9 billion passenger-miles — an all-time high. The Borealis was specifically named alongside the Pacific Surfliner, Cascades, and Empire Service as contributing to those record gains. That's notable company: the Amtrak's Record Ridership and the Airo Fleet Revolution piece we published last year covers the system-wide picture in more depth.
How the Three-State Model Works
The Borealis wouldn't exist without a legal and financial framework that most passengers never think about. The PRIIA Act of 2008 established the template: for Amtrak routes under approximately 750 miles, states that want service must contract with Amtrak and cover a share of operating costs. Amtrak provides the trains, crews, reservations system, and marketing. States provide the subsidy that keeps fares from being prohibitively high.
The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), signed in 2021, added rocket fuel to the model by making $6 billion available for state-supported corridor improvements and $12 billion for intercity passenger rail grants more broadly. As of 2024, Amtrak operates 29 state-supported routes with 18 state partners. The Borealis is the first new state-supported corridor launched in the Midwest under the IIJA era.
What makes the Borealis distinctive is the three-state cost-sharing structure. Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Illinois each have a political stake in the route — and each have stations and communities within their borders who benefit from it. That distribution of risk and reward is harder to unravel than a single-state arrangement. When Wisconsin faces a difficult budget cycle, Illinois and Minnesota remain invested. When Illinois's chronic fiscal pressures make transit funding a fight (and they do — see the NITA Act Story for how Illinois recently restructured its regional transit funding), Wisconsin and Minnesota provide ballast.
IDOT Secretary Gia Biagi put it plainly at the two-year anniversary: "The success of the Borealis is a testament to the strong partnership with our neighbors in Wisconsin and Minnesota, as well as the public's desire for travel options they can count on and afford."
The exact funding split between the three states isn't publicly disclosed, but each covers a share of net operating losses under the PRIIA formula — meaning the arrangement is directly tied to ridership performance. As the train fills up, the per-passenger subsidy drops.
Why It Worked
Several factors converged to make the Borealis a faster-than-expected success.
Frequency is the variable that changed everything. Going from one to two daily round trips doesn't just add marginal passengers — it transforms the corridor's utility for a much larger pool of potential riders. Amtrak EVP Jennifer Mitchell said it clearly at the two-year mark: "People want another choice besides driving and offering service multiple times daily supercharges the number of customers who choose Amtrak because our schedules fit their needs."
That word — "supercharges" — is technically defensible. The Rail Passengers Association had projected, back in 2019, that the second frequency would remove roughly 90,000 car trips annually from the corridor and that approximately 60% of Borealis passengers would be diverting from car travel. The at-capacity ridership result suggests those projections were conservative, not optimistic.
Pent-up demand was real. The Mississippi River corridor connects two major metros (St. Paul/Minneapolis and Chicago) through smaller cities — La Crosse, Milwaukee — that are underserved by air and have limited highway alternatives at scale. The Borealis filled a genuine gap.
Federal support de-risked the launch. Without IIJA funding to offset early capital and operating costs, at least one of the three states might have declined to participate. The FRA's Corridor ID Program is now replicating this playbook for dozens of proposed routes across the country, using federal investment to make state participation financially viable.
Network effects across the corridor. Adding the Borealis didn't cannibalize the Empire Builder — it grew the whole market. When combined, the Borealis, Empire Builder, and Hiawatha together reached 1.8 million passengers in two years. The corridor became more legible and usable once passengers had multiple daily departure options.
Honest Challenges
No responsible anniversary coverage skips the caveats, and there are real ones here.
On-time performance is an unknown. Amtrak's two-year anniversary releases didn't disclose OTP data for the Borealis, which is conspicuous. The train runs on CPKC freight infrastructure, and despite Amtrak's statutory priority under 49 U.S.C. § 24308, freight interference has historically been a drag on corridor OTP across Amtrak's network. Passengers who've ridden the Borealis anecdotally describe variable punctuality — something Amtrak should be more transparent about as the route matures.
The equipment is aging. The Amfleet II coaches date from the 1970s and '80s. Amtrak's new Siemens Airo trainsets — quieter, more accessible, with modern interiors — will eventually replace state-supported corridor equipment, but the Pacific Northwest's Cascades service is first in line. The Midwest's turn is years away, and in the interim, deferred maintenance on aging cars is a real operational risk.
Funding continuity is not guaranteed. The three-state arrangement requires annual legislative appropriations in three state capitals with three different political environments. More immediately, the IIJA expires on September 30, 2026. The leading reauthorization vehicle in Congress — the BUILD America 250 Act — is not the lifeline rail advocates had hoped for: it cuts transit funding −14% vs. the IIJA baseline and slashes passenger rail −43%, eliminating all guaranteed rail appropriations in favor of fully discretionary spending. For state corridor partnerships like the Borealis's, that shift would replace predictable federal cost-sharing with annual congressional uncertainty. This is not hypothetical: it's the same transit fiscal cliff dynamic that has put urban agencies across the country in budget crisis mode.
Infrastructure limits the next step. Amtrak EVP Mitchell pointedly said the agency "looks forward to adding more seating capacity and more service in this corridor in the months and years to come." But single-track sections on CPKC between St. Paul and Milwaukee create real capacity constraints. A third daily frequency isn't just a funding question — it's an infrastructure question that requires negotiations with a freight railroad.
What's Next — and What's at Stake
Federal Railroad Administrator David Fink called the Borealis "a testament to what happens when we prioritize the American traveler" and framed it as part of a broader "Golden Age of Rail." WisDOT Secretary Kristina Boardman emphasized the breadth of the ridership: "Students, business workers and families choose passenger rail because it's safe, efficient and reliable."
The Borealis is, at this point, the strongest proof-of-concept the Midwest has for what more frequent, reliable intercity rail can do. It's not a niche tourist product. It's running at capacity with a diverse passenger base and a three-state political coalition that has survived two budget cycles. For advocates watching corridors like Chicago–Columbus, Kansas City–St. Louis, or Detroit–Chicago, the model is clear: build the state partnerships first, use federal funding to de-risk the launch, and let ridership growth make the political case for infrastructure investment.
What happens in Washington this fall — whether Congress passes a reauthorization that keeps the IIJA-era corridor investment intact — will shape whether the Borealis's success story spreads or stays exceptional. That's the question worth watching between now and September 30.
In the meantime, there are seats available between St. Paul and Chicago, with good coffee and views of the Mississippi. Demand, apparently, is not the problem.