MIPRC kicks off its 25th Anniversary celebration with 'Invest Midwest' forum & gala

The Midwest Interstate Passenger Rail Commission (MIPRC) is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, and kicked off the commemoration with an “Invest Midwest” forum on June 12 at Chicago Union Station, looking back at all the Midwestern states have achieved over the years and plans for the future.

More than 100 Midwestern transportation officials, former and current MIPRC commissioners, partners and allies gathered for the Invest Midwest event, which took its name from the $1.84 million federal CRISI regional planning grant MIPRC was recently awarded to expand on the work the Federal Railroad Administration, MIPRC and its member states undertook in the latter part of the 2010s.

MIPRC’s roots go back to at least the 1990s, when the first interstate talks about regional passenger rail development began, or perhaps the even the early ‘80s, when Midwestern states first began talking to each other about working together to develop high-speed rail, said Tim Hoeffner, a former MIPRC commissioner, chair and vice chair, and former director of the Michigan Department of Transportation’s Office of Rail during his presentation, entitled “Midwest Interstate Passenger Rail Commission Journey – What a Ride,” the opening session of the forum.

MIPRC’s formation

The Interstate High Speed Rail Compact in 1981 was the first such entity to emerge in the region (it also included some Eastern states) but Hoeffner noted it was limited to cooperation on a feasibility study of potential high-speed rail connections.

A few years after the federal Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991 (ISTEA) designated five high speed corridors across the country – including one in the Midwest linking Chicago with Detroit, St Louis, and Milwaukee – Wisconsin invited Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, and Ohio to a meeting to discuss developing a Midwest passenger rail network, which became the Midwest Regional Rail Initiative.

As those states’ DOT staff were working on the MWRRI plan, some Midwestern legislators were thinking about and working on legislation for what became the Midwest Interstate Passenger Rail Compact.

The Council of State Governments’ Midwestern Legislative Conference High Speed Rail Task Force was created in 1996, with then-Minnesota Sen. Sheila Kiscaden as chair, then-Missouri Rep. Joan Bray as vice chair, and CSG Midwest staffer Laura Kliewer as the liaison. The task force met with members of other existing compacts, advocates, FRA officials and others, and started envisioning an interstate compact with a broader mission that would allow the compact’s mission to grow over time if needed – and with the political arm missing from the previous compact and the MWRRI.

What emerged was the Midwest Interstate Passenger Rail Compact, which charges MIPRC to work with and support the efforts of state DOTs, along with coordinating interaction on passenger rail development, and promoting both current improvements and long-range plans for intercity passenger rail service in the Midwest. It also allows MIPRC to implement or provide oversight for passenger rail projects, if the affected states agree.

The Midwest Interstate Passenger Rail Compact language was finalized in 1999, and legislators from the MLC’s High Speed Rail Task Force introduced bills to adopt the new compact – which had to be adopted substantially “as is” by member states – in their states starting with the 2000 legislative sessions. While legislators and DOT officials thought it would likely take several years before the required three states adopted the compact, Indiana, Minnesota and Missouri (in that order) enacted it by the end of June of 2000, thus formally bringing MIPRC into being.

Hoeffner said he, and other DOT officials, were skeptical of MIPRC at first, but realized over time that while technical staff could deliver a plan, MIPRC was needed to sell its vision to state legislators and secure federal funding.

“Putting it mildly, the state DOT staff were not the kindest to [Kliewer],” he said. “We didn’t need a ‘political person’ showing up at these technical meetings. The young and dumb technical staff had this project handled.

“Boy, were we wrong, thank Heaven for Laura and The Council of State Governments Midwest. Hand-in-glove was where we needed to be and where we ended up.”

And MIPRC did grow over time. Not only did it play a significant role in convincing the federal government to provide programs and funding for passenger rail development, the commission also:

• Provided the legal framework allowing Illinois, Michigan, Missouri and Wisconsin to jointly own and operate the “Charger” locomotives and “Venture” coaches on state-supported trains – the Midwest Equipment Pool; and
• Led the region’s engagement with the Federal Railroad Administration to develop the Midwest Regional Rail Plan (MWRRP), which validated the earlier MWRRI and made the case for MIPRC to assume an expanded governance role in developing a regional passenger rail network.

Reflecting on his own experience, Hoeffner said he went from skeptical opponent to enthusiastic supporter who served as MIPRC’s vice chair, chair, and vice chair again.

“There are so many important aspects to MIPRC, key to me is relationships between states, he said. “MIPRC’s ability to develop multi-state projects and programs is critical to our future; it was used as the conduit for the Midwest equipment acquisition, and it will be key to the delivery of important multi-state projects” including the “South of the Lake” plan to untangle freight and passenger trains in a constricted Northwest Indiana corridor.

After Hoeffner’s presentation, representatives of MIPRC member states’ departments of transportation each gave a presentation on their respective passenger rail services and development plans. But for those familiar with similar presentations at MIPRC Annual Meetings, these presentations had an added layer; looking back at when and how their passenger rail services came to be and how they have progressed over the years.

At the end of the member state DOTs’ presentations, Laura Kliewer, who moderated the session, showed a map of Midwestern passenger rail corridors within the MWRRP of 2021 with an overlay of all the Midwestern routes that had received awards in the December 2023 inaugural round of the FRA’s Corridor ID Program; 22 Midwestern routes were chosen, and 20 of those were in the MWRRP plan.

Following those presentations, MIPRC Chair Beth McCluskey moderated a discussion among two Midwestern state department of transportation heads and an Amtrak leader, summarizing lessons learned from MIPRC’s first quarter-century. 

Successes and challenges

Minnesota Department of Transportation Commissioner Nancy Daubenberger said MIPRC’s biggest success is as a regional framework that provided a legal basis for coordination and cooperation between the Minnesota, Wisconsin and Illinois departments of transportation to launch the year-old, Twin Cities-Milwaukee-Chicago Borealis. The MIPRC framework was, and still is key for future service planning and for pursuing federal grants, she said.

Illinois Department of Transportation Secretary Gia Biaggi agreed, saying the Borealis and the Midwest Equipment pool are indicative of what can be done across state borders.

Jennifer Mitchell, executive vice president of strategy and planning at Amtrak, and a former deputy administrator of the FRA, said the Borealis, 110-mph service in Michigan and Illinois, and the Equipment Pool are all tangible and visible successes. Nationally, she said Amtrak measures success by record ridership and revenue in FY 2025 (which ended on June 30); and in service expansions like those in Virginia and North Carolina, and in California.

Less obvious but no less important, Mitchell added, is that lessons from the process of ordering, receiving and preparing the Midwest’s Venture cars for revenue service were applied to the Airo trains that are scheduled to enter service on the Northeast Corridor as early as 2026.

Asked about the biggest challenge or opportunity to the future of passenger rail, Daubenberger said the biggest challenge is a shortage of rolling stock for current and projected ridership demand while the biggest opportunity lies in incremental improvements in maintaining schedules.

Biaggi said incremental improvement is good framing, adding that challenges lie in discovering what day-to-day increments are necessary to implement a vision of “bigger, better, faster”; and then answering the question, how do we get there?

Mitchell said the challenges and opportunities lie in messaging and how we talk about passenger rail. She suggested that when state policymakers talk to their federal counterparts, they should frame improvements to freight rail as also beneficial to passenger rail and to think regionally.

Amtrak CHIP presentation

The afternoon’s perspective shifted more to the future when Amtrak program managers John Becker and Matt Swiontek provided a review of the Chicago Hub Improvement Program (CHIP) to upgrade Chicago Union Station for anticipated growth and demand for both Amtrak and Metra, Chicago’s commuter rail system, by 2040.

At Union Station, they said the plan includes reactivating mail platforms unused for more than 50 years (when mail service was discontinued) to provide level boarding; widening some commuter rail platforms and improving trainshed ventilation by creating a west-to-east airflow; and improving operations, accessibility and passenger flow in the station concourse.

Other, external elements include:

• Replacing a 111-year-old lift bridge over the Chicago River that currently is used more than 1,200 times annually by almost all south- and east-bound Amtrak trains, two Metra lines and BNSF and Norfolk Southern freight trains;
• New yards and maintenance facilities south of Union Station at Canal and 14th streets; and
• Double-tracking a 19-mile stretch of Michigan’s 110-mph rail corridor between Niles and Glenwood Road, northeast of Dowagiac, to eliminate conflicting meetings between passenger and freight trains created by the current single-track configuration.

While the mail platform reactivation project is fully funded and scheduled to be completed by the Winter of 2026, CHIP’s other components are dependent on uncertain federal discretionary funding, they said.

The day’s celebration ended with a reception and gala event to honor and thank commissioners and partners who have ensured MIPRC’s successful first quarter-century, and a silent auction that raised $2,325 to benefit a new scholarship MIPRC is establishing for students pursuing railroad-related degrees at Midwestern colleges and universities.

Thank you to everyone who attended the celebration, and a special thanks to Amtrak, who partnered with MIPRC on the Invest Midwest forum, and to the event’s sponsors: HNTB, Quandel Consultants and SMART-TD.