A train station near Blount and Livingston streets is now being considered for downtown Madison

This location joins Monona Terrace and others around the city

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The city of Madison has long considered Monona Terrace a potential site for a downtown train station, but a second downtown location is now being considered: the area currently occupied by MG&E’s Blount Generating Station around Blount and Livingston streets. 

As city staff this year studied six zones with the potential for a station, they extended the timeline to consider more options, says Tom Lynch, director of the city transportation department. “We expanded the number of sites we were looking at,” he says. 

Currently, the area around Blount and Livingston is occupied by the generation station, parking lots, and staging areas for materials and equipment. While the location might stretch the current definition of Madison’s downtown, Metro is currently building a bus rapid transit station about two blocks away at East Washington Avenue and Livingston Street, where both the north-south and east-west BRT lines would stop.

“Amtrak often has a desire to have downtown to downtown connections,” says Lynch. That helps the rail service boost ridership by adding business travelers. At a kick-off meeting in December where the train station study was announced, Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway noted, “At the end of the day, we have to pick a station that works for Amtrak, and that works for the Federal Railroad Administration. That’s sort of the bottom line.”

But a downtown station won’t likely be the only possibility. Lynch says the study that the city is preparing, currently in draft form, will be more of a “screening” process. The study will identify several sites where a train station is feasible rather than a single preferred alternative. Besides downtown, staff is looking at areas near the UW campus, the former Oscar Mayer plant, the airport, First Street, and the near east side. Soon, the public will get to weigh in. 

“We’d like to go out to the public in late October if we can swing that,” says Lynch. “It definitely will not be the final meeting.”

Madison has been trying to bring passenger rail service back to the city for more than a decade, and previous plans did focus on downtown. In 2010, the city was moving towards retrofitting the Wisconsin Department of Administration building on Wilson Street as a train station. The state won more than $800 million in federal funding to build a high-speed rail line, but Gov. Scott Walker rejected the money, which was then split mostly between California, Illinois, Washington and Florida.

This time around, the station would be for passenger rail that wouldn’t travel at high speeds, but Lynch says it’s a similar rare chance for lots of federal funding. “The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law provided an unprecedented amount of funding for passenger rail,” says Lynch. For those who want to bring passenger rail service back to Madison, he says, “now is probably the best opportunity.”