College Commuter: Amtrak
The westbound Amtrak Wolverine departing the Dearborn Transit Center. This article is a brief rewrite of a Twitter thread from June 2019 .
I’m a pharmacy student at Wayne State University living in Rochester Hills, a suburb north of Detroit. I choose to take the bus to school . Once a month I visit Dearborn, a suburb just west of Detroit, in the evening to meet with a local pharmacy association.
I usually get there by taking another bus from downtown, but this makes the return trip long as I have to transfer back to my bus home at a late hour. I’ll drive to Dearborn if I don’t have the time or the desire to put up with that.
Just for fun on the morning of one of these meetings I looked up the afternoon Amtrak timetable between Troy, a suburb near Rochester Hills, and Dearborn. To my surprise, the trip was actually possible.
Using heavy rail to travel between two points in the same metro area felt like abusing the system, but it was tempting and wasn’t that expensive as a one-off trip.
Thus began a short adventure.
Troy Transit Center
The Troy Transit Center is one of three Amtrak stations in north Metro Detroit, the other two being Pontiac and Royal Oak. The station has a storied history that highlights some of the struggles we’ve had with regional cooperation over the years.
This station sees three heavy rail departures to Chicago daily at around 6:00am, 10:00am, and 6:00pm. Almost everyone who gets on the train here rides it all the way to Chicago, with the exception of college students who use it to travel to and from Ann Arbor and Kalamazoo.
This train does stop in Detroit, but the station is on the edge of downtown. With its limited schedule it’s not an option for a daily commute, especially when buses from the suburbs already provide more direct service for a smaller fare without the need to transfer.
A suburban crosstown bus at the train station.
The Trip
It took about an hour to reach Dearborn after a short delay due to a freight train passing through Milwaukee Junction, a busy yard in Detroit. This is par for the course on a multi-hour Amtrak route, as they share most of their track with freight traffic that has priority.
I made it on time for the meeting; however, due to the limited schedule I was stuck in Dearborn for over two hours after the meeting ended before my train home arrived.
The Amtrak line looking north.
A freight train trailing the Amtrak.
The Return
The eastbound train returning from Chicago was running on Amtrak time, the classic 20 minutes behind. Just as I was the only person to disembark in Dearborn, I was the only person to board here heading home. Makes sense — I wasn’t using this train for its intended purpose on this trip.
What we could have
Commuter rail has re-entered regional discussion lately with talks of building a new service between Detroit and Ann Arbor , a large college town along the current Amtrak route. A smaller train running along the route as it exists today could almost be a limited-stop commuter line with no new infrastructure needed.
We’ll see what happens in the next few years. Until then, I’ll stick to what works in our area right now — peak-hour bus travel to and from class.