Just as Michael J. McMurray, Chicago’s commissioner of aviation, strikes us as one of the most capable and respected members of Mayor Brandon Johnson’s administration, so Sean P. Duffy, Donald Trump’s Secretary of Transportation, fills that role in Donald Trump’s motley crew.

As part of his remit, Duffy sits on the Amtrak board of directors and was front and center Friday when his department announced $5.3 billion in targeted new funding for America’s passenger rail.

The plan includes a hefty $2 billion for new trainsets, not to mention more than $100 million to rehab various Chicago bridges. For an administration that famously denigrates Chicago, Friday was a notably good day for federal money for the city’s historic status as a rail hub.

Under Duffy, the Department has said it will fund 43 new Amtrak trainsets and rehabilitate 41 locomotives, many of them serving routes running out of Chicago, such as the “Hiawatha” (Amtrak’s best Midwestern train), “Blue Water,” “Illini,” “Saluki,” “Illinois Zephyr,” “Pere Marquette” and “Wolverine.”

As regular Amtrak riders know, the demand for rail in the Midwest has exploded in recent years, and that hunger makes us supportive of an expansion, even though previous iterations of this board mostly regarded Amtrak outside the Northeast Corridor as a boondoggle.

Times have changed. This new money is mostly going to corridors where rail makes great sense. Especially today, being as rail has enjoyed a major comeback.

Just look at the demand for the relatively new Borealis train between Chicago and St. Paul. The route carried more than 200,000 passengers in its first year of operation after launching in 2024, a count that only is climbing. Often the once-a-day train is completely sold out.

If Amtrak were an airline, it would already have added an additional Borealis departure, or three, or four. European train operators would have done the same. Amtrak being Amtrak and the U.S. being the U.S., that means months if not years of planning and environmental consultations and whatnot for something that would be far simpler almost anywhere else in the world.

Or take Amtrak’s high-potential Michigan Service, another busy train that connects Chicago with college towns like Kalamazoo and Ann Arbor, along with the thriving Detroit. There are a paltry three trains a day, assuming at least one is not canceled for one reason or another, a frequent occurrence in our experience. And delays are ubiquitous, as we personally can attest.

In Europe or many parts of Asia, such a train-friendly corridor would enjoy hourly service and run on time. Sure, the issues of freight interference are different in Europe, but much of the Wolverine line now is owned by the state of Michigan, and operated and maintained by Amtrak itself. Bring on the trains and the history of the Borealis suggests the customers will come.

We’re endlessly fascinated by U.S. inefficiency when it comes to transportation infrastructure on the ground (airports are another matter). On Wednesday, the Chicago Department of Transportation said that the crucial Cortland Street bridge would be closed to vehicles for several more years, clogging for yet longer one of the city’s most traffic-choked sections. And an overly elaborate new CTA station at State and Lake is taking years, choking the North Loop with construction equipment. CDOT has its explanations in both cases, but no reasonable person would deem it a quick mover.

Amtrak Midwest, as the state-supported service in Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Missouri is branded, features a variety of high-demand corridors best served by rail. Those tracks have, in many cases, been improved with hundreds of millions of Midwest taxpayers’ money; and yet Amtrak has a chronic rolling stock shortage, meaning that it simply doesn’t have the cars to transport people who want to travel. Even the single Borealis run today is a weird mix of rolling stock grabbed from other trains, and heavily sold days can’t easily be given more capacity.

That’s why Duffy was right to focus on new and rehabilitated equipment for these Midwest corridors that can put them to immediate use and fill them with passengers.

As a happy byproduct, the announcement also included $572 million in funding to create a new Chicago maintenance facility for Amtrak at the current Union Pacific yard in Chicago’s Bridgeport neighborhood. This potentially makes room for Justin Ishbia’s long-term plan for a new White Sox stadium on the yard’s current 47-acre footprint, which is familiar to Amtrak riders as it is located along the Chicago River and south of Roosevelt Road in the South Loop. The U.S. Department of Transportation is not (and should not be) in the business of helping private developers, of course, but the relocation away from the South Loop is a positive for the city’s future growth, Ishbia or no Ishbia.

But the DOT is in the business of rehabbing wheezing trains and building new ones so all of the millions that Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker has spent on track improvements do not remain absurdly under-utilized. Amtrak Midwest is a partnership between the states and the feds. One of the few functional ones.

Where does the money come from? Duffy, who knows the rhetorical preferences of his boss, claims much of it is from “canceling Gavin Newsom’s disastrous high-speed train.”

He refers, of course, to the notorious California High-Speed Rail (CAHSR), a publicly funded project that first was authorized in, believe it or not, 2008. Of course a high-speed train between Los Angeles and San Francisco makes sense. But the CAHSR, which began construction in 2015 (11 years ago!) and has already blown through some $18 billion, is one of the great cash sucks of all time. If you think Chicago’s Red Line extension is a boondoggle, and we do, you have not met the CAHSR, which is projected to cost at least $125 billion or more in total.

As it stands, some segments of the line, which should have gone directly between the two great cities but was effectively gerrymandered by local pols to the east, might open in the next decade; but no one is sure even of that. What is certain is the gaping funding gap and the political opportunity to attack the governor of California.

Just as a point of reference, when the train was authorized, the estimated cost was $33 billion. Now we are at $126 billion with no high-speed tracks yet operational. The train is, of course, a classic example of the perennial perils of sunk costs; abandoning the line seems absurd (even to us) given how much money would be written off. But the cost, and the funding gap, just keeps growing.

“Instead of wasting billions of dollars on a train to nowhere,” Duffy said in his announcement, “we are fixing thousands of grade crossings — saving lives and improving communities across America. We’re also making an unprecedented investment in Amtrak, because President Trump and I are committed to making passenger rail in America great again. Gavin Newsom should take notes — this is how you properly invest hard-earned taxpayer dollars.”

It is not that simple, of course, and we could do without the MAGA blather. But Duffy, fundamentally, is correct, and his department has put the bulk of its investment in the right place: actual equipment and real seats upon which people want to travel across the great Midwest.

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