When the Amtrak Borealis pulled out of St. Paul Union Depot on May 1, 2024, it did something deceptively simple: it added a second daily round-trip between Chicago and the Twin Cities. Two years later, the numbers suggest that "deceptively simple" is doing a lot of work. According to Amtrak's May 2026 second-anniversary announcement, more than 416,000 passengers have ridden the Borealis in its first two years — a route that, before it existed, transportation planners weren't entirely sure would fill its seats. It has, repeatedly, and the waiting list of "we told you so" is getting long.
A Second Frequency Changes Everything
For decades, the only scheduled passenger rail service between Chicago and Minneapolis–St. Paul was the Empire Builder, Amtrak's long-distance run to Seattle. The Empire Builder is a wonderful train, but it stops in the Twin Cities once a day in each direction, and its schedule is optimized for a two-night transcontinental journey — not for a Milwaukee student heading home for the weekend or a La Crosse consultant meeting a client in the Loop by lunchtime. If that one train didn't fit your day, you drove.
The Borealis fixed that by layering a dedicated state-supported corridor service on top of the Empire Builder's slot, giving the corridor two daily round-trips. Add the Hiawatha Service between Milwaukee and Chicago, and the southern half of the route now feels like a real regional network. The Borealis itself covers roughly 410 miles in about eight hours, hugging the Mississippi River between St. Paul and La Crosse, with a regional café car that makes the trip feel less like transportation and more like something you'd actually choose.
The Ridership Numbers Are the Story
Year One: The Floodgate Opens
Amtrak's second-anniversary release put hard numbers to what conductors had been seeing anecdotally. In Amtrak's fiscal year 2025 — the first full year of Borealis operation — the train carried 213,000 passengers, a 227% surge over the partial-year FY24 launch. That's not organic growth; that's a floodgate opening. Riders who wanted train service between these cities had been there all along, waiting for a schedule that fit their lives. The cumulative two-year total of 416,000+ passengers reflects that pent-up demand materializing year after year.
Amtrak EVP Jennifer Mitchell put the operational lesson bluntly in the anniversary release: "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's the frequency-as-service argument transit planners have made for buses and subways for years — it turns out it applies to intercity rail, too. The corresponding Amtrak systemwide FY25 records — 34.5 million trips, $2.7 billion in ticket revenue, and 6.9 billion passenger-miles — suggest the Borealis is one story inside a much larger ridership renaissance.
The Corridor Effect: Growth Without Cannibalization
Zoom out to the full Chicago–Twin Cities corridor — Borealis plus Empire Builder plus Hiawatha combined — and total ridership hit nearly 1.8 million passengers, up 27% over two years. Importantly, the Borealis isn't cannibalizing the Empire Builder; both trains are carrying more people than before, because they're serving different trip types. This is what latent demand looks like in a spreadsheet: not a stolen market share, but a market that grew because supply finally met it.
A Three-State Compact, Not a Bilateral Deal
How State-Supported Rail Works
The Borealis is technically a state-supported corridor, one of three service tiers Amtrak operates alongside the Northeast Corridor and its long-distance network. State-supported routes run under 750 miles, and participating states contract with Amtrak to cover operating costs above farebox revenue while the Federal Railroad Administration funds capital investments through grants.
What makes the Borealis unusual is that it required three state DOTs — Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Illinois — to sign on together, rather than the more typical single-state arrangement you see with California's Capitol Corridor or Virginia's Northeast Regional extensions. That's a diplomatic and financial feat, and it required years of intergovernmental negotiation before the first train rolled.
Three Secretaries, One Signal
WisDOT Secretary Kristina Boardman noted in the anniversary release that "students, business workers and families choose passenger rail because it's safe, efficient and reliable," while IDOT Secretary Gia Biagi framed the launch as evidence of "the public's desire for travel options they can count on and afford." MnDOT Commissioner Nancy Daubenberger went further, observing that the Borealis "continues to operate at capacity" and hinting at appetite to "potentially grow and expand on this much-needed service."
That capacity language matters. Trains running full aren't just a marketing win — they're an operational signal that a third daily frequency, or additional coaches, would probably fill too. Mitchell confirmed as much: "We look forward to adding more seating capacity and more service in this corridor in the months and years to come."
The Case Against Flying (and Sometimes Driving)
Skeptics will note that the Borealis is not fast. Eight hours on the train versus roughly six-and-a-half to seven by car on I-90/I-94, or a nominal 1.5-hour flight that balloons to four-plus hours door-to-door once you factor in airport time. Rail can't win a stopwatch race against a Chicago–Minneapolis flight.
But rail doesn't have to. It serves intermediate cities — Milwaukee, La Crosse, Winona, Red Wing — that no commercial flight will ever connect. It drops you in the middle of downtown rather than at O'Hare or MSP. And it gives you eight hours of working, sleeping, or watching the Mississippi River, which is not a bad trade for the sort of traveler who was going to drive anyway.
Reliability is another genuine differentiator. The Empire Builder, which shares tracks with BNSF freight traffic, has historically arrived on time only around 35–45% of the time — a well-documented consequence of freight priority on shared-use corridors. The Borealis, operating under a dedicated state-supported service agreement, tends to perform better on this measure, which matters to the business traveler who actually needs to be somewhere by a specific hour. FRA Administrator David Fink called the route "a testament to what happens when we prioritize the American traveler," pitching it as part of a broader "Golden Age of Rail" — a phrase that will feel earned or aspirational depending on what Congress does next.
What Comes After IIJA
Which brings us to the elephant on the platform. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act — the capital funding source that made the Borealis possible — expires September 30, 2026. Its potential successor, the BUILD America 250 Act, cleared the House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee 62–2 in late May 2026, but the passenger rail provisions are a significant retreat: $64.3 billion authorized for rail with $0 in guaranteed formula funding, compared to IIJA's $71 billion in guaranteed rail money. Everything would move to discretionary appropriations, subject to the annual budget knife-fight.
That structural shift lands at an awkward moment. The Borealis is the poster child for what federal capital grants can unlock at the state level, and it exists within a broader transit fiscal cliff conversation that has already forced painful choices at agencies like SEPTA and BART. Illinois recently stabilized its own regional transit picture through the NITA Act, but state fixes don't substitute for federal capital dollars when the project is a 400-mile corridor across three states.
Looking Down the Track
The Borealis's two-year report card is unusually clean: strong ridership, growing revenue, no cannibalization of adjacent services, and a governance model that proves multi-state compacts can actually ship. It's the kind of result transit advocates can point to when someone asks whether Americans will ride trains if you build them well. The evidence, at least on this corridor, is yes — and they'll bring friends.
The harder question is whether Washington will keep the capital pipeline open long enough for the next Borealis to be built. Chicago's hub-and-spoke reach into Detroit, St. Louis, Indianapolis, and Cincinnati offers a menu of obvious candidates, and the Twin Cities partnership is a working template. Whether those routes get built, or whether the Borealis becomes a beloved one-off, will depend less on ridership demand — which has clearly been answered — than on what replaces IIJA when the clock runs out this fall.