12 Years After Being Built, Wisconsin’s Talgo Trains Enter Service

Talgo Trainsets. Photo by Garrick Jannene.

Milwaukee-made trains designed for high-speed service picked up their first passengers last week.

Wisconsin taxpayers paid millions for the Talgo trainsets, but will need to spend even more on a plane ticket if they ever want to ride them.

Instead of welcoming passengers traveling between Chicago, Milwaukee and Madison, the Badger-colored trainsets are ferrying passengers in Lagos, Nigeria.

The first 17 miles of Lagos’ planned 23-mile Red Line opened to passengers on Feb. 29. The line is the second commuter rail line in Africa’s largest urban center, which boasts a population of greater than 21 million. Nigerian President Bola Tinubu, who initiated the project more than two decades ago as governor of the city-state, attended the much-anticipated opening.

“This is the dream realized,” said Tinubu. But it certainly wasn’t Wisconsin’s dream.

In 2010, then-governor-elect Scott Walker refused a $823 million federal grant to build an Amtrak Hiawatha Service extension to Madison and plan an extension to Minneapolis, but the state was still on the hook to pay for the trainsets ordered in 2009 by predecessor Jim Doyle. Rather than invest in a maintenance facility to put the trainsets into use on the existing line, Walker and the Republican-controlled Wisconsin Legislature had the state default on the contract. Talgo, which assembled the trains in a facility in Milwaukee’s Century City business park, sued in 2012 as the trainsets were completed and the equipment was placed into storage for a decade.

Wisconsin ultimately settled with Talgo, a move that cost the state $59 million and allowed the Spanish company to maintain ownership of the equipment.

In January 2022, it was announced that a Lagos transit authority would buy the equipment. The Governor of Lagos State, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, joined Talgo USA CEO Antonio Perez and Mayor Cavalier Johnson to celebrate the purchase. In September 2022, a container ship delivered the diesel-powered trains to Lagos while construction continued on the new line, which currently includes eight stations and several road overpasses.

Lagos has big dreams for how the trainsets will be used. Government officials estimate that a staggering 750,000 passengers per day, 375,000 passengers for each 420-seat train, will ride the line. The 86-mile Hiawatha Service between Milwaukee and Chicago, with seven daily roundtrips, has never served more than 883,000 passengers in an entire year. The Nigerian rail line is expected to make 37 trips per day over a much shorter corridor. The nature of the line, with more stops and a higher frequency in a congested corridor, will undoubtedly spur more rides than the Hiawatha’s downtown-to-downtown ridership pattern. But 750,000 rides per day would still be nearly double the ridership of Chicago’s entire 102-mile “L” system.

The Lagos rail lines are being constructed by China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation.

Taglo hasn’t abandoned Milwaukee. In addition to building the two Series 8 trainsets for Wisconsin, it built two for use on the Amtrak Cascades Service between Oregon, Washington and Vancouver, Canada. Those trainsets remain in service.

The company also landed two major rehabilitation contracts for restoring subway and commuter rail equipment from California at the Milwaukee plant, originally built for A.O. Smith. But the subway contract with Los Angeles’ Metro agency was canceled in 2022, resulting in competing lawsuits and 10 subway cars being held in Milwaukee.

Amtrak, meanwhile, has procured new Venture coaches from Siemens for the Hiawatha and several other lines, replacing 1980s Horizon coaches, but the rollout has been delayed with only one set regularly operating on the Hiawatha.

In December, Wisconsin won several planning grants to study expanding passenger rail service to Madison, Eau Claire and Green Bay as part of a larger expansion effort. A second daily roundtrip between Milwaukee, La Crosse and St. Paul is expected to start this year, expanding service provided by the cross-country Empire Builder.

Videos and Photos

Exploring Lagos Red Line Rail from above.

Credit: @tfk_gawat @AerialLagos

🚄 #Throwback pic.twitter.com/l5SBwAV2Xj

— Office of the SA on Social Media to PBAT🇳🇬 (@Dolusegun16) February 29, 2024

Lagos, we are ready.

Today marks a monumental day as we commission the LMRT Red Line, a 37 km rail line integrating key bus terminals at Oyingbo, Yaba, Oshodi, Ikeja, and Iju. This is more than just a project; it's a generational leap for our city.

The LMRT Red Line isn't… pic.twitter.com/PXPGd1iZnY

— Babajide Sanwo-Olu (@jidesanwoolu) February 29, 2024

2012 Photos