Milwaukee Must Replace Failing Streetcar Switches

Streetcar switch. Photo by Jeramey Jannene.

When city officials and project consultants celebrated the opening of The Hop streetcar system in 2018, it wasn’t clear they had installed a system with a major operational issue. The system’s M Line, which connects the Historic Third Ward, Downtown and Lower East Side, ran without issue for almost six years.

But the first full winter for the L Line, a lakefront extension through the base of The Couture, has exposed a major deficiency.

The two powered switches necessary to allow the L Line vehicles to deviate from the main line are routinely failing, taking the lakefront route offline with it. Fixing the issue will cost an estimated $200,000.

Water is pooling in the switches, causing an electrical short when a train goes over the switch and a connection is formed between the rails. The issue occurs at switches at N. Milwaukee and E. Michigan streets, where the L Line heads east to the lakefront, and N. Milwaukee Street and E. Kilbourn Avenue where the L Line turns around to head south to the Third Ward.

“We do unfortunately have to shut it down when that’s happening,” said Chuck Schumacher, newly-promoted Department of Public Works operations administration manager at the Feb. 20 Public Works Committee meeting. “It’s happened numerous times.”

“We always used to say this thing can run in any weather, snow is not a problem. Apparently, it is a problem,” said Alderman Robert Bauman.

“We’re really kind of waiting for a dry stretch of weather so we can get in and do some work and investigate what is going on with the switches. There’s a few different things that could be happening,” said Schumacher. “It could be a purely mechanical problem, it could be that the rubber boot that is around the switch is starting to fail, it could be that there is something underneath the switch that needs to be excavated and addressed.”

Schumacher, at a Jan. 29 meeting, attributed the issue to water collection, not salt. However, the issue has become particularly acute when salt has been visibly sitting on city streets.  The Hop Alerts X account, which tracks the system’s status, has been consistently messaging issues with the switches in recent months. The most recent issue occurred Monday morning, but the account reveals several L Line outages last week.

If the Michigan Street switch fails, the entire L Line is suspended and the M Line continues. If the Kilbourn Avenue switch fails, the switch is put in its M Line position and the L Line is continued north to Burns Commons alongside the M Line.

“In the summer, if we can make the money happen, we’re going to work on replacing those switches,” said Schumacher. “The plan would be to excavate the two switches that are having problem and we would replace them with new switches, which would give us a chance to see what’s underneath them and see if that’s part of the problem.”

“Well that’s big money,” said Bauman, who has a background working in the railroad industry.

“They’re about $100,000 a piece. Yes, it is big money,” said Schumacher.

City officials have not publicly discussed an issue with the third powered switch at Broadway and E. St. Paul Avenue.

The Hop is budgeted to cost $5.1 million to operate in 2025, which is to be partially offset by $1.7 million in sponsorships and federal operating grants. The gap is filled by funding from the city’s Transportation Fund, which receives revenue from the city’s parking meters, parking citations and parking lots and structures.

Other Problems

The switches aren’t the only issue plaguing the system’s operation.

The city’s in-house system manager, who oversees operations contractor TransDev and handles grants and compliance measures, was asked to resign last fall after two years on the job. A grant audit report deadline was missed. That streetcar system manager job is now accepting applicants, with a starting salary of $116,000.

TransDev is also replacing all of the vehicle wheels after state regulators found poorly maintained wheels were causing derailments.

HNTB, which helped design the system, is serving as a consultant on the system’s operational oversight while the manager position is open. “They were a natural selection for it,” said Schumacher. But the engineering firm is not performing any grant management, nor outreach to the council and others about issues. “All of that work is very laborious, I can tell you because I’m doing it now.”

A streetcar was also rammed Sunday by a driver running a red light on E. Wisconsin Avenue. No injuries were reported, but a DPW official confirmed the vehicle is offline while the damage is assessed. The city has five vehicles, with three required to maintain baseline operations and four required at service peaks.

Ridership has slipped, as has the city’s reporting of it.

“This far this year, we’ve had 957 [daily riders] on the M-Line and 77 on the L Line,” said Schumacher. The city hasn’t published daily ridership data, counted by sensors in the vehicles, since August 2024, but has published monthly totals. After climbing year-over-year for almost every month since the pandemic’s 2020 onset, ridership came in below 2023 totals for November and December 2024.

TransLoc, the system’s real-time tracking service that enables riders to avoid waiting for extended periods at stations, was offline for much of 2025, but has recently been reactivated. A DPW official previously attributed the issue to a data update.