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Less than four months after losing nearly all of an $810 million grant, Wisconsin is again seeking federal high-speed rail money - this time to upgrade the existing Milwaukee-to-Chicago passenger line.

Gov. Scott Walker's administration announced Tuesday that the state will seek at least $150 million to add equipment and facilities for Amtrak's Hiawatha line.

Walker said the money would be used to upgrade service on the Hiawatha line, as a step toward increasing the speed of the trains to nearly 110 mph and reducing the trip time from 90 minutes to one hour. If the improved service draws more riders, the number of round trips could be increased, he said during a news conference in the Milwaukee Intermodal Station.

The governor said he expected Illinois, Michigan and Missouri would join in the application for the federal dollars, part of the $8 billion rail element of President Barack Obama's administration's stimulus package.

In a bizarre twist, some of the money that Walker now seeks originally was allocated for the Milwaukee-to-Madison route he previously turned down. That money is available because a fellow Republican governor rejected it as well.

Walker said the money would allow Wisconsin to buy two more train sets and eight locomotives and to build a maintenance facility for that equipment and two train sets now under construction.

But speeding up the trains would require additional track improvements in future years, said Reggie Newson, executive assistant to state Transportation Secretary Mark Gottlieb.

The locomotives, train sets and maintenance base would have been covered by the earlier $810 million grant. But the maintenance base, originally envisioned as a $52 million facility in Madison, now would be a $60 million facility at the Talgo Inc. train plant in the Century City complex on Milwaukee's north side.

Walker administration officials said the state's contract with Talgo, signed by former Gov. Jim Doyle's administration, committed the state to spending at least $30 million on a maintenance base, regardless of whether it had federal funding. This grant application would seek $40 million to $50 million in federal funds for that project, matched by $10 million to $12 million in state funds, which the Walker administration calls a $20 million saving for state taxpayers.

Talgo is building two trains for the Hiawatha, and the state had an option for two more if the service was extended to Madison. When the Milwaukee-to-Madison line was canceled, Talgo said it would turn its factory into a maintenance base after fulfilling its current orders from Wisconsin and Oregon.

The state plans to seek bids for train sets instead of exercising its option for more trains from Talgo, Newson said. The state would also seek bids for locomotives, which are not built at Talgo's Milwaukee plant.

Asked about the apparent reversal in his position on rail initiatives, Walker said he always had supported improvements to the Hiawatha. It's a popular and established service, without the local opposition that complicated the Milwaukee-to-Madison link he campaigned against.

"This is not inconsistent with the position I took in the past," he said.

Milwaukee Ald. Robert Bauman called the governor's pursuit of federal stimulus money for the Hiawatha "rank hypocrisy."

Walker criticized federal stimulus spending during his campaign and rejected federal money that could have been used for the maintenance building on the city's north side. The state will pay more for that facility than if it had accepted the initial $810 million, Bauman said.

The Hiawatha provides the Midwest's most frequent and heavily used Amtrak service. It's one of the top 10 routes nationwide, nearly doubling ridership in the past eight years, to a record 792,848 last year. Ridership has continued to rise, notching gains of almost 8% each in January and February, on a pace to exceed 850,000 this year.

A study by America 2050, a national coalition of urban planners, found a Milwaukee-to-Chicago high-speed rail route would have the greatest ridership potential in the Midwest and would rank in the top 1% of 7,870 possible routes nationwide, based on population, employment and connections to urban rail transit.

Local business and government leaders strongly support the Hiawatha, which they see as a vital link to Chicago's regional economy. Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett and the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce had urged Walker to seek the money.

"The continued growth of this line will only strengthen our state as people and dollars continue to flow between the Milwaukee and Chicago metropolitan areas," Barrett wrote in a March 18 letter to the governor and Gottlieb. "Milwaukee's business community recognizes this fact and has been a proponent of continued investment in this line."

On Tuesday, Barrett hailed Walker's announcement, and said he would urge the federal government to approve the application. He said the maintenance base at the Talgo plant would help keep jobs in Milwaukee.

Walker campaigned against plans to extend the Hiawatha to Madison with a new 110-mph leg. The federal government had awarded the state $810 million in stimulus money to cover the full construction cost of the route, as part of a larger plan for high-speed service from Chicago to the Twin Cities and throughout the Midwest.

But Walker and his fellow Republicans objected to state taxpayers picking up the line's operating costs, initially projected at $7.5 million a year. Revised ridership estimates could have cut $2.8 million off the state share, however, and the state could have used existing federal aid to cover up to 90% of its costs.

After Walker defeated Barrett, the Democratic candidate and high-speed rail supporter, in the Nov. 2 gubernatorial election, the federal government pulled all but $2 million of the $810 million grant and distributed that money to other states, along with $400 million that Ohio's newly elected Republican Gov. John Kasich had rejected for a 79-mph line linking his state's three largest cities.

Although he was seen as a passenger rail foe, Walker has said he supports keeping the Hiawatha running and would have been open to using the $810 million to improve existing rail service.

Before the federal government withdrew most of its money, the MMAC offered Walker a plan to use at least some of the money on various rail projects without building the Milwaukee-to-Madison line. The plan included renovating the train shed and buying three new locomotives and a new set of passenger cars to supplement the two train sets already ordered from Talgo.

After the state lost the initial grant, MMAC President Tim Sheehy said he hoped his group's plan could be the basis of a new application for federal funds.

That opportunity arose when Florida Gov. Rick Scott, another newly elected Republican, canceled a planned Tampa-to-Orlando high-speed rail line and rejected $2.4 billion in federal money - including $342 million redistributed from the Wisconsin and Ohio projects.

The U.S. Department of Transportation has set an April 4 deadline for states to apply for a share of the money Florida spurned. Federal officials have no timeline for announcing when the money will be handed out, a department spokeswoman said.

The original $810 million grant would have included almost $20 million to renovate the train shed at the downtown Milwaukee Amtrak-Greyhound station, mainly to comply with the federal Americans with Disabilities Act. The state now plans to fund that project partly with the $2 million remaining from the larger grant, plus another $8 million in separate federal funding and to seek legislative permission to use about $10 million in previously authorized state passenger rail borrowing power, Newson said.

Wisconsin received another $12 million in stimulus money for improving the Hiawatha tracks and the passenger platform at the Mitchell International Airport station. That money was not jeopardized by the controversy over the Milwaukee-to-Madison line.