Amtrak Milwaukee Airport Station

Yeah, but that's still a lot cheaper than a cab to Manhattan! And anyway,
you get to ride the neat little monorail to the airport station. That's cool!

Will Amtrak General Mitchell Airport station require special magnetically encoded tickets and premium fares like EWR station?

Why would they?

>>>I like the idea of Amtrak trains stopping at airports, or stations close to airports. Too bad the Long Distance Trains cannot do it. It seems Amtrak will only do it for corridor trains.<<<

One of the serious proposals of the future of Amtrak is to eliminate long distance trains and instead focus on short to medium distance trains as feeders to airports. Thru ticketing, much as Continental does with Amtrak at Newark Liberty.

It was hoped that passengers would be able to board and alight Amtrak's Hiawatha Service at the new Milwaukee Airport Station this coming Monday. However, Amtrak's reservation system did not have the station programmed in, because no firm start date had been set.

Yesterday, I stopped by the station and asked the agents what the latest was, and they didn't have any idea about when the station might open, but that it wouldn't be Monday, and it would probably be sometime in December. Today, someone (not an official tied to the project) else e-mailed me and said the new hoped-for startup date is 30 December.

We shall see.

Let's hope it starts soon.

AmtrakFan

It seems a new date of January 18 has been set to open MKA. The station will not be staffed.

We'll see how it goes, and whether it starts to hurt the Hiawatha's on-time performance. It might actually "steal" some passengers from MKE, since that stop should be more convenient to south-side Milwaukee residents.

The MKE-MKA fare is expected to be six dollars, as reported here and elsewhere. I don't know if there will be a fare difference from Chicago to MKA, vs. the $20 tarriff to downtown Milwaukee. It's currently not yet on the amtrak.com reservations page, though it should be very soon.

Naturally, I will be out of town (on a train, no less) when the first train runs.

"Milwaukee airport boon for Amtrak"

"An increasing number of Chicago-area travelers are opting to fly out of Milwaukee's Mitchell International Airport rather than Midway or O'Hare airports in Chicago, say Amtrak officials.

Why does Amtrak care about people's flight preferences?

They say the Milwaukee airport's increased popularity is the explanation for why Glenview's train station is second only to Union Station in ridership in the Chicago area. "

...

"Amtrak statistics show that 40,726 people took Amtrak trains to or from the Glenview station in 2005, compared with 32,708 the previous year."

see http://www.pioneerlocal.com/cgi-bin/ppo ... 30637.html for the full article

I recently took the Hiawatha service for the first time since the Milwaukee Airport station opened, and based on my limited datapoints, ridership does seem to have increased significantly weather due to the airport station or other factors I know not.

I live in Chicago, and I priced some flights out of Milwaukee against some Midway flights. What a mistake - the Midway flights are so much cheaper it's not funny. I really wanted a train ride to the airport, but that's not going to happen anytime soon.

MKE isn't really going to complete with Midway, but with O'Hare (drawing from the north side primarily)

On this, MKE fares are quite comparable on 14 day advance to popular business destinations - some cheaper, some slightly more expensive.

There are folks who live along Metra's NCS corridor who could ride the train to O'hare, but choose instead to drive or catch a ride to Glenview to catch the Hiawatha service north to MKE's Mitchell Airport. Even though the savings is negligible in some cases, the longer ride is worth it to some if only to escape O'hare's congestion. I don't know how close Amtrak's station is to Mitchell's terminal, but it can't be much worse than the location of Metra's station to O'hare's terminal, which is pretty much in the parking lot...

The last time I traveled on the Hiawatha, it was nearly sold out. When we pulled into the airport station, I was surprised to see virtually half the passengers on board get up and leave the train. However, so few seemed to be carrying luggage of any kind that I suspect that most weren't actually catching a flight, but live locally and simply use the parking lot as a convenient park-n-ride to shorten their drive home.

----------------------------------------

Not much detail I’m afraid: ProgressiveRailroading.com

• up to $5,050,000 to construct a second platform serving Amtrak riders at the Milwaukee Mitchell International Airport

Pop quiz:

- A train has ten doors per side
- Each configured to work low platforms with traps/stairs
- The crew only opens 3 of those doors
- The line inside the train to use those doors is almost a car-length long
- We spend $5,000,000 to build another platform

What is the return on investment in terms of...
1. Dwell time reduction
2. Dollars
3. Safety

The answer of course, is zero, negative five million taxpayer dollars, and zero if they don't open more doors. It's a mystery why they're not using that $5m to put in high platforms and a gauntlet track. Or just get the crew to open more doors. It's like the powers-that-be have never been on this train.

Tad/ keep in mind the current crew can’t feasibly open more than 3-4 doors at a time in Horizon cars. That changes with the Siemens cars, which presumably will have trainline-controlled automatic doors. I can’t say whether the new platform is needed but it won’t be as simple as what you describe.