Milwaukee-made trains started service last week, but they won’t be connecting Wisconsin to Minnesota as originally planned. Instead, these trains are servicing Lagos, Nigeria.
In 2010, Scott Walker, then the Republican governor-elect, turned down an $823 million federal grant to expand Amtrak into Madison, the state’s capital, and extend service to Minneapolis. His predecessor, Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle, ordered the trains in 2009 after securing the contracts and federal funds that Walker later refused. Regardless of the contract refusal, the state still needed to pay for the assembled trains.
Talgo, the company that assembled the trains in Milwaukee, sued the state in 2012 because the trains it completed building were sitting in storage. Wisconsin settled the lawsuit with Talgo, which cost the state $59 million. In 2022, the Lagos transit authority purchased the trains.
“This is more than just a project; it’s a generational leap for our city,” Babajide Sanwo-Olu, the executive governor of Lagos, wrote on X. “The LMRT Red Line isn’t just about improving our city’s mobility; it’s about reshaping our urban landscape and setting a new pace for development.”
Lagos is the largest city in Africa. The Red Line will be the city’s second commuter railway, with an expected ridership of 500,000 per day.
Milwaukee originally invested $10 million to improve the site and boost attraction for Talgo to manufacture the trains there. Walker said he backed out of the plan on the basis of excess government spending, claiming the operating costs placed on the state would be too high.
“Free money is not free,” Walker said at a press conference in 2010. “The reality is it comes with a cost.”
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Walker also believed only Milwaukee and Madison would benefit from connecting Chicago and Minneapolis via Madison, not the state’s rural communities.
In December 2023, Wisconsin won several grants to study expanding rail service to Madison and other Wisconsin cities, including Green Bay. A second daily route on the Amtrak’s Empire Builder line between Milwaukee and St. Paul, Minnesota, is expected to begin this year.
