Northern Lights Express

[Korh]

It's just really difficult because we essentially have three hubs for different modes of transportation in the Twin Cities: Amtrak is primarily in St. Paul, Local travel is centered around Downtown Minneapolis, and air travel is out of Bloomington. As the plans stand today, it would be annoying to transfer between any of these three as a tourist. In a perfect would all of these would be centralized or have faster transit connections.

This is kind of off-topic, but I do think that having an electrified rail tunnel replacing I-94 would be hugely beneficial to the Target Field station as it is possible to connect it from the south instead. Having a special express between the two, as well as running Amtrak service in this tunnel would be super nice. I also believe the new Siemens locomotives will be able to switch between overhead electric and diesel. Build it to support high speeds, and viola! You've got a way to connect between DT St. Paul and DT Minneapolis! Getting political support for that, on the other hand. . .

That would be beneficial but I still question if there's enough space at TFS, assuming there is political will I would either assume a completely underground terminal or some sort of floating station like some of the brightline ones, although the lowry tunnel is actually an annoying chokepoint that can't be easily worked around since iirc it cant be expanded, lord know some planers would love to expand it to 4-5 lanes in each direction but the walls bump next to two notable cathedrals and the walker and iirc one of those is protected and can't be torn down,

[angrysuburbanite]

It's just really difficult because we essentially have three hubs for different modes of transportation in the Twin Cities: Amtrak is primarily in St. Paul, Local travel is centered around Downtown Minneapolis, and air travel is out of Bloomington. As the plans stand today, it would be annoying to transfer between any of these three as a tourist. In a perfect would all of these would be centralized or have faster transit connections.

This is kind of off-topic, but I do think that having an electrified rail tunnel replacing I-94 would be hugely beneficial to the Target Field station as it is possible to connect it from the south instead. Having a special express between the two, as well as running Amtrak service in this tunnel would be super nice. I also believe the new Siemens locomotives will be able to switch between overhead electric and diesel. Build it to support high speeds, and viola! You've got a way to connect between DT St. Paul and DT Minneapolis! Getting political support for that, on the other hand. . .

That would be beneficial but I still question if there's enough space at TFS, assuming there is political will I would either assume a completely underground terminal or some sort of floating station like some of the brightline ones, although the lowry tunnel is actually an annoying chokepoint that can't be easily worked around since iirc it cant be expanded, lord know some planers would love to expand it to 4-5 lanes in each direction but the walls bump next to two notable cathedrals and the walker and iirc one of those is protected and can't be torn down,

I think a full underground terminal would probably work well here and be most compatible with an eventual downtown LRT tunnel, but my dumb, uninformed solution to the Lowry tunnel area would be to just build the tunnel really deep. Another option would be to follow 12th Street downtown underground, as it would avoid Lowry completely and have a more gradual curve to keep speeds higher.