Kevin C. Smith
-Milwaukee Union (sorry "Intermodal") Station looks nice with the new trainshed. But I still don't understand why they went to the trouble/expense of building an overhead walkway when there were existing underground ramps.
Well first off the original Milwaukee 1965 station was built as a joint effort between C&NW, Milwaukee Road and WisDOT because even back then the two railroads did not want to spend the money to consolidate their seperate stations and Milwaukee wanted it's freeway built and the C&NW lakefront station torn down as Milwaukee via Henry Meyer was already looking towards the dream of a lakefront park without railroad tracks.
Milwaukee Intermodal Station is only being used to 1/3 it's capacity currently. It has 5 tracks and that extra long platform between track 2 and 3 because it was intended to serve a number of Longer Distance and longer length Chicago to Twin Cities trains PLUS Chicago to Northern Wisconsin trains, not just one train to St. Paul (it was a joint C&NW and Milwaukee Road facility) . The shorter platforms were intended for both Milwaukee suburban and Chicago-Milwaukee service for both railroads. I remember using the station in 1970 with my Parents as a kid. C&NW and Milwaukee Road had both their Chicago Trains in the station at one time, on tracks right next to each other (track 2 & 3), track 1 was kept open for the soon to arrive Fox River Valley train from Chicago to Oshkosh and points North.
Milwaukee Road made a number of attempts to sell the City of Milwaukee on West Suburban Service including running it's only West Suburban train 1 year beyond the formation of Amtrak and making one more attempt while it was bankrupt in the early 1980's with the Budd Co's SPV2000 demonstrator.
I suspect the Mezzanine Platform and stairs were built as WisDot intends to convert the second floor at some point to a loft style waiting room from offices. Just a hunch I have that is the future intent as they will need more waiting room capacity at some point to handle surge capacity if multiple trains hit the station at once. Originally they were meant to replace the tunnels and the tunnels were to be filled with sand but smarter people prevailed and determined they should keep one set of tunnels for passenger handling capacity as the narrow escalators to the 2nd floor level are probably not enough by themseleves. Ostensibly, they refer to the tunnels now as a emergency exit route.
The curent depot was the third Milwaukee Road depot built in Milwaukee. Prior to the stone Milwaukee Road Depot built, they had a large Wooden Depot that also used a tracks in the street layout to reach it. You can Google and read up on the wooden Milwaukee Passenger depot. Info on it via the Internet. the C&NW Lakefront line was actually the first and only line between Milwaukee and Chicago and the Milwaukee Road had no lines South of Milwaukee. Milwaukee Road built the Milwaukee to Chicago route via Sturtevant but you'll notice that none of it's branches originated from the Sturtevant line. Instead they originated from the C&NW lakefront line (then Chicago Milwaukee RR I believe) and crossed the new Milwaukee line see link to Map below............as they were seperate railroads back then and not yet absorbed into the Milwaukee road.
https://www.loc.gov/resource/g4061p.rr004640/