Aboard Amtrak’s Hiawatha service, quiet conversations complement the rumble of steel wheels maneuvering along the tracks.

A fresh layer of snow covers the ground while the train pulls away from the Milwaukee Intermodal Station, unraveling its cars from one Midwestern city toward another.

En route to Chicago Union Station, passengers ride along an Amtrak system forged by the Rail Passenger Service Act of 1970, which sought to revitalize American train travel. In approving the law, Congress declared that “modern, efficient, intercity railroad passenger service is a necessary part of a balanced transportation system.” 

Wisconsin operates three Amtrak routes: the Hiawatha, which runs a round-trip corridor service seven times daily between Chicago and Milwaukee; the Empire Builder, running one long-distance round trip each day between Chicago and Seattle or Portland; and the Borealis, a route added last May that runs one daily round trip between St. Paul, Milwaukee and Chicago.

In 2021, then-President Joe Biden signed into law the  $1.2 trillion Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), which awarded $2.1 billion to Amtrak and its partners — the largest federal investment in public transit in history. 

Wisconsin residents haven’t yet fully experienced the law’s effects, but plans are well underway. The law awarded the Wisconsin Department of Transportation four $500,000 grants through a federal Corridor Identification and Development Program. 

These grants are funding research for a range of potential new services. Those include a proposed corridor connecting Milwaukee to Minneapolis through Madison and Eau Claire; an additional daily round trip between Chicago and St. Paul via La Crosse to complement the Empire Builder; and making the Hiawatha more frequent and extending its service to Green Bay.

In late December, I rode a sold-out Hiawatha train from Milwaukee to Chicago. The route is Amtrak’s busiest in the Midwest and the nation’s seventh-busiest. 

I returned in early January, talking to passengers along the way for our latest edition of Public Square, a series highlighting how Wisconsin residents connect with their communities. I gathered a variety of perspectives about how people use passenger trains and on efforts to make them more accessible.

I heard from a range of people, including a Milwaukee college student riding home to Chicago and a trucker stranded on the first leg of a cross-country journey home for the holidays. All opted for the train instead of a car.

Amanda Simms, who works for a long-haul trucking company in Allenton, Wisconsin, didn’t initially plan to take Amtrak to see her family in Philadelphia over the holidays. But an eyesight issue prompted the 28-year-old to abandon her plans to make the 14-hour drive. Booking a flight wouldn’t have worked, due to high cost and baggage limits. 

So she pivoted to rail. Simms felt positive in the early stage of her three-train, 20-plus-hour Amtrak experience. 

“All the peace that you see, it’s quiet — it’s something different,” Simms said. “When I’m riding the train in the city, you see all the buildings and stuff, but to see it from this aspect it’s different. I’ll take this any day.”

Sitting quietly alone a few rows away, Teni Fajemisin, 18, watched through the window as the train passed a blur of snow-covered trees. The Chicago native was heading home after finishing his first semester of a two-year program at the Milwaukee School of Engineering, where he said he has “met nice people” and contributes to a project that aims to build a new community center in Milwaukee’s Metcalfe Park neighborhood.

Fajemisin said riding the 90-minute Hiawatha route made the most sense since his dad works near Chicago Union Station.

While riding the Hiawatha back to Milwaukee a few weeks later, I spoke with Phillip Loan, who was riding in a business class seat, which offers extra legroom and footrests for a higher place. The 27-year–old Atlanta native was en route to a job interview at a Milwaukee hospital — hoping to become a Wisconsin resident. 

Loan said Amtrak offered the cheapest option, and he said he’d consider riding again, particularly if the system improves the convenience and quality of the service. He mentioned the attractiveness of high-speed services in other countries, recounting an “awesome” experience riding between major cities while visiting Japan.

Research for an expansion in Wisconsin continues. Its prospects depend on the success of the Muskego Yard Freight Rail Bypass project, which would open up the shared tracks for Amtrak’s passenger trains to function more efficiently, state DOT Rail Chief Lisa Stern told WPR in October. 

Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin last year announced a fresh $72.8 million in federal funding for the bypass project, with plans to begin construction in 2026. 

While the feasibility of expansion to cities like Madison, Green Bay and Eau Claire continues to be researched, the state DOT says it’s working to execute the grant agreement for the bypass project — aiming to make train travel in Wisconsin more accessible for riders like those I met.

Ditching cars for rail, Wisconsin Amtrak passengers find accessibility is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

On Jan. 22, Wisconsin Watch reporter Hallie Claflin and photojournalist Joe Timmerman joined a group of volunteers in Jefferson County overnight to observe the annual “point in time” count of the homeless population. These counts are conducted on the same night in January across the country to provide a one-night snapshot of homelessness. 

But this count has multiple pitfalls, as noted in our recent investigation. 

What did they find? A pair of dedicated volunteers and a count that, while increasing, still struggles to capture the true homeless population, especially in rural areas.

What made us interested in observing the PIT count?

In December, we traveled four hours to the small town of Shell Lake where a homeless father and daughter who had been living in their car for over a year gave us a glimpse into their everyday lives. After extensively investigating the rural homelessness crisis across the state, we realized this family wouldn’t have shown up in the January PIT count because they were temporarily staying in a friend’s basement.

We wanted to understand who actually gets counted, and who doesn’t. The unhoused population is increasing, but who is missing from the data? 

What we saw

After attending Gov. Tony Evers’ State of the State address at the State Capitol in the evening, we hopped in the car and headed to Jefferson County for the late night count. We rode along with the volunteers as they surveyed the county. A fresh layer of snow added even more bite to the single-digit temperature, and we couldn’t stand outside for much longer than a few minutes before retreating to the heated car. 

In Johnson Creek, we found cars lined up in the back of a local restaurant and truck stop. Here, several people were found sleeping in their vehicles, one with a child in the back. The volunteers, Sandy Hahn and Britanie Peaslee, were quick to give them an extra blanket. The woman and child inside had been living in the van for six months, and she was working at the restaurant.     

On the drive, the pair shared stories about past PIT counts they had participated in. We followed along as they drove through parking lots, checked around corners, went into public bathrooms, searched rest stops, and asked gas station workers if they had seen anyone who was unhoused.

Another person sleeping in a car wouldn’t engage with them. Because of this, they couldn’t verbally verify that they were homeless, which means they weren’t included in the official count. The car was running — likely for warmth — and the windows were covered with blankets for privacy. 

We quickly realized many unhoused people aren’t included in the count based on this rule alone, among the many other restrictions on who they can count. 

The volunteers left a blanket on the windshield and continued on, acknowledging that if in their position, they would also be hesitant to talk to two strangers at 2 a.m. in the snow. 

Peaslee and Hahn were thorough in their search and were one of four groups covering the county. 

It was clear the volunteers could search all day and all night and still never find a fraction of the total population, but they do their best with the guidelines they are given.

We parted ways around 4 a.m. — barely staying awake — and made it back to our warm apartments by 4:30.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

We observed the annual homeless count in a rural county. Here’s what we saw. is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

*** A reporter’s view ***

Bennet Goldstein: Water cooler conversations rarely get as quirky as strategizing the best ways to obtain photographs of cute, occasionally destructive rodents. But for nearly a month it was all I could discuss.

From equipment purchases to road trip plotting, our team’s preparation to spot a beaver was either a lesson in steadfast resolve or overkill.

With a car weighed down by plenty of granola, trail mix and Goldfish crackers, Wisconsin Watch photojournalist Joe Timmerman, videographer Trisha Young and I spent a stretch of October driving through Wisconsin’s Driftless Area and Central Sands to report a series of solutions-focused news stories. We sought to learn how beavers and their dams could mitigate severe flooding and drought, which Wisconsin and other Midwestern states increasingly face due to climate change.

I could not write about beavers without capturing one on camera, a task that has even on occasion flummoxed The New York Times. 

Thankfully, a grant from the Solutions Journalism Network helped fund this undertaking.

We splashed through streams, bushwhacked through brush and hopscotched through reed grass to locate dry land where we might capture an image of our elusive furry target.

***

Last summer, I took a reporting trip to Viroqua for a different story with colleagues from the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk. There, former Vernon County Conservationist Ben Wojahn described a dilemma facing western Wisconsin communities as they consider removing failing flood control dams constructed by the federal government in the mid-1900s.

Maintaining the structures would cost more than their value, according to evaluations, but cutting gaps into them without backup protections left residents feeling insecure and unprepared for future floodwaters. 

In an ideal world, Wojahn suggested, the county could bring in  wood-chomping beavers to slow the flow by building nature’s dams.

What would that take?

Beaver relocation has happened before. Natural resources officials in Idaho and California famously parachuted the critters into hard-to-reach mountainous regions in the late 1940s and 1950s.

Such measures probably don’t make sense in Wisconsin, where beaver colonies polka-dot the state.

But how to find one?

Scientists warned me spotting beavers in the wild is exceptionally difficult, adding that they are typically active in the wee morning hours and at dusk.  Their astute smelling and hearing senses warn them of peepers.

Then again, these researchers had not attempted to disguise themselves as piles of grass.

I initially considered purchasing ghillie suits, but the thought of spending hours commando-crawling in an outfit meant to resemble foliage sounded unappealing. 

We ruled out the prospect of wading into lake shallows because Joe had rented a camera lens worth $10,000. Shrouding ourselves beneath synthetic netting would create too much noise when we stopped to pick our noses or stretch a hamstring.

I turned to wildlife photographers. 

Blogs offered many tips. One professional recommended hiding in shrubbery and shadows, but he urged the adventurous to be wary of ticks.

Then it dawned on me I might be overthinking this exercise. I could instead take inspiration from hunters who have plenty of tools for quietly stalking prey. I settled on a pop-up blind and silent swivel chair.

We needed only to locate a beaver lodge and lurk.

***

One October afternoon, Joe and I canoed across a pond near the village of Rio. We passed pond scum and lily pad patches before arriving at a rickety duck hunting stand, its wood warped and spotted with exposed nails. 

I steadied the canoe as Joe lunged for a foothold on the water-encircled platform. It wobbled under his weight. We eased the gear atop the stand as the sun hung low in the sky. 

“What’s going on?” I said, bobbing in the canoe as he unfurled the blind.

Joe laughed.

“Is this the first of many firsts of the lengths to which we’re going?” I asked, recording the moment on a GoPro. “You’re going into a special wildlife viewing tent with a hunting chair and hunkering down for the next hour in hopes of spotting a rodent.”

Joe had spotty cell reception, so we agreed I would return at dusk if I didn’t hear from him first.

Birds chirped as I paddled back to the car, periodically banging into submerged logs.

I hunched in the front seat, hoping to avoid agitating our host’s yappy dogs, who might scare the beavers. Perched in the host’s living room window, the canines stared me down.

“I’m in my car so they don’t hear me or smell me,” I texted Joe.

A mix of dread and boredom set in as I waited, praying this would be our only beaver-spotting attempt.

An hour passed. Sandhill cranes warbled in the distance.

Joe texted.

“It just barely stuck its head above water then dove back down but I got pictures of one!!!!”

*** A photojournalist’s view ***

Joe Timmerman: As my heartbeat quickened I shifted the camera’s gears, quietly racing to document our first beaver sighting without disturbing the natural moment.

I’ve photographed surveyors in the world’s longest cave on 16-hour expeditions, woken up hours before dawn to see Indiana’s returned bison under the rising sun and hovered inches away from bats suffering from white nose syndrome in Texas. But I had never undertaken an assignment like this. 

When Bennet asked how I felt about the lengths we had taken to photograph these cunning Castorids, all I could do was laugh. 

Spend pieces of a month traveling across south-central Wisconsin’s beautiful landscape to prove skeptical experts wrong — and serve our readers — by returning with photos of North America’s largest rodent?

I was all in.

After our first surprise sighting near Rio we tested our luck at an additional site. 
A shared hunch told us we could return home with an even better image. A few days later when we visited Jim Hoffman’s wide-spanning property at Goose Landing, I descended again into Bennet’s hunting tent before dusk.

An hour passed. The sun’s setting silhouetted the once-golden, green and yellow surroundings. Then another 30 minutes. My eyes darted between the beavers’ lodge across the pond and their trail to some felled trees nearby that Hoffman had showed us. 

A slight movement caught my attention. My eye recognized the  unmistakable slicked-back head of a beaver swimming across the pond. Then a second head popped up, and a third.

I zoomed in all the way, pushing our old company camera to the max in the darkening conditions. The mere seconds of opportunity etched the beaver images into the memory card before the animals disappeared beneath the water’s surface.

I waited another 30 minutes before calling it quits due to the lack of natural light. I stepped out of the tent and began packing up our gear, somewhat content but wanting more. 

That’s when I saw a beaver swimming directly toward me. I fumbled to pick the camera off the ground, manually spinning the sight into focus when the beaver’s tail slapped the water, sounding a thunderous echo that made me jump. 

After spending 11 hours that day making over 1,200 images, I couldn’t believe my sleepy eyes. I flipped through the first few pictures of the tail slap only to discover they were comically out of focus.

Moments later, a reprieve. The beaver re-emerged, seeming to look at me as  it swam nearby — offering a fresh opportunity to make a better picture.

“All three of them are swimming like 20 feet away from me right now slapping their tails,” I texted Bennet and Trisha as they hid in their car. 

“You could probably walk over and come see them.”

After all our silent stalking, the beavers had found us. Rather than rushing away, though, they were lingering — slapping the water to warn others of our presence. As the evening’s first stars appeared above, two swam parallelly in the pond below, putting on a show in trying to shoo us away.

“On our way!” Trisha replied.

*** A videojournalist’s view ***

Trisha Young: By the time Bennet and I rushed to the pond where Joe was photographing, about five or six beavers were making their rounds on the water. Our arrival seemed to increase their resolve to show us who was boss.

Thwack! The sound of the tail slap made me jump, stopping all of us in our tracks. A short while later, another thwack, then another. The beavers would beeline toward us, slap, then circle back and repeat the admonition.“What brave creatures,” I thought. Their boldness was intimidating, and the idea of being tail-slapped or bitten by their massive teeth was terrifying. Yet I was truly starting to like these hydraulic engineering rodents.

Bennet assured Joe and me that beavers would struggle to catch us on land. So I imagined falling to my fate into the dark, beaver-infested waters. 

I’ve interacted with beavers before, always while kayaking. I was accustomed to the tail slap, which I always interpreted as a signal that I should keep it moving. But this was something special: a whole colony of beavers. 

As I watched one pair of beavers swim side by side — one small, one large — I wondered whether Mama Beaver was showing her youngster how to lay down the law and make their authority known.

The sky turned far too dark for our cameras. We remained captivated by the furry varmints’ antics for about half an hour before finally obliging to their demand.

We headed back to the car, giddy with excitement despite the tiring day  reporting at Goose Landing. The encounter was invigorating, even if our cameras couldn’t fully capture the magic we witnessed in the darkness.

The interaction reminded me of something Hoffman emphasized as we traversed the land with him: Beavers have been here for thousands of years.

The Ojibwe tell stories of Amik, a giant beaver who was given an extraordinary tail and reshaped land across the Midwest. In these stories, the beaver holds a place of significance alongside the wolf, bear and muskrat.

The fur trade in Wisconsin centuries ago decimated millions of beavers and other fur-bearing animals, forever altering ecosystems and Native livelihoods. Tribes were forced to compete with traders for resources, disrupting traditional ways of life.

Now, another shift is underway in wetland conservation, reviving a story about the symbiotic relationship between beavers and humans. I was grateful to glimpse these creatures and document how humans are trying to mimic their engineering to restore Wisconsin wetlands.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

Dam lucky: How we caught a beaver (on camera) is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Green-blue waves crashed against the rocks on a partly cloudy day last August. The white sails of a passing boat flapped in the wind. The wrecked Hetty Taylor schooner remained sunken beneath these Lake Michigan waters. 

And at the base of the Sheboygan Breakwater Lighthouse, Robert Devroy III cast his line. 

Fishing and hunting are two of Devroy’s favorite things about Wisconsin, where there’s “never a dull moment,” he said. He and his family highly value the outdoor recreation Wisconsin has to offer, whether dirt bike races or long days by the lake. 

Born and raised in Green Bay, Devroy, a Marine Corps veteran, works days as a maintenance technician at Salm Partners, a sausage and hot dog manufacturer in Denmark, Wis. He works occasional nights as a stagehand at Green Bay’s Epic Event Center, where he enjoys attending concerts. That explained the Eric Church T-shirt he sported while waiting for a gullible walleye or muskie to take his bait.

His other job is at home, parenting two daughters and two sons. He’s also attending a technical college. But Devroy’s life hasn’t always been so balanced.

As the Edgewater Generating Station’s smokestacks reflected in his blue sunglasses, he spoke about how “some really hard times” shaped who he is today. That included spending five years in prison for “something stupid.”

“I knew I needed to change, to not continue to go down that path and continue to hurt the people that were around me and that I loved,” Devroy said. “My wife is a big key in where I’m at today, to drive me to be the man that I want to be.” 

She was always there when he left prison, and he realized he needed to do more to take care of his young family.

“If I would’ve continued going down that path that I was living in, that would have never happened,” Devroy said. “I would have been in and out of prison and not going anywhere, not being a successful person in our society.”

But now? “The sky’s the limit,” Devroy said.

Devroy said he’s proud of his career — working on with electrical and mechanical issues, which he entered after embarking on a non-traditional journey. 

He didn’t initially graduate from high school but ultimately gained his high school equivalency degree. Devroy is now in his third year of a maintenance technician program at Northeast Wisconsin Technical College, which includes apprenticeship opportunities. After working on industrial equipment much of his life, he said the program helped him grow into his current position as maintenance supervisor at Salm, where he has worked for a decade. 

“There’s a new challenge every day,” he said. “This path I’ve chosen, it’s endless.” 

Balancing school with two jobs and family duties isn’t always easy, but he’s excited to contemplate his future. Perhaps he’ll even pursue a master’s degree as a journeyman maintenance technician, he said. But for the moment, he was focused on hooking “anything that wants to eat a worm.” 

“When I find time to myself, this is what I do right here,” Devroy said, gazing out at the lake. “Listen to music and enjoy Mother Nature.”

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

Robert Devroy III discovers fulfillment in work and family is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

As rays of setting sun striped the hill at Madison’s James Madison Park, Arthur Kohl-Riggs practiced handstands on his favorite tree. 

“I never really planned on handstanding but it’s proven very meditative,” he said. 

Kohl-Riggs, 36, a native of Madison’s west side, said he initially started exercising at the park to regain strength in his shoulder following an injury. Now it’s his “third space” — a familiar spot to connect with others. 

“The idea of being a regular at a park is nice,” he said. “There’s no cost, you don’t have to buy a drink an hour, it’s just a free space to be.” 

As fellow park-goers walked by, some stopped to watch as Kohl-Riggs wrapped his hands around the old oak’s branch, brought his feet near his hands, hooked the branch with his feet, then dropped his arms to the ground, dangling upside down.

“I’ve been trying to find ways to reintegrate intentionally into the community,” Kohl-Riggs said.

Routines developed earlier in the pandemic kept him cooped inside for months at a time, he said. But now, between using his friend’s laundry machine in exchange for handyman work and attending karaoke nights at the Gamma Ray Bar just off the Capitol Square, Kohl-Riggs said he’s forcing himself into community — resisting the forces of complacency to avoid reisolation.

Kohl-Riggs has lived eclectically.

As an activist and citizen journalist in 2012, he ran a protest campaign against Scott Walker in the Republican primary for governor, touting the values of Republicans like Robert La Follette and Abraham Lincoln and growing a Lincoln-like beard. He received nearly 20,000 votes, 3% of the tally, despite spending less than $2,000. Over the next five years, he and a friend produced a tongue-in-cheek YouTube travel series about Dane County called Dane & Dash. He said he now works as a legal investigator for a private law firm that works on public defense overflow cases, helping to “ease the congested public defender rolls,” he said.

Kohl-Riggs said he feels optimistic about the state’s future, despite a range of challenges people face — from housing and financial instability to a lack of health care.  

“Despair only hinders progress,” he said. “We’re more capable now than we were before of seeing more of the faults in a lot of the systems that have always existed. It’s harder to be complacent when everything’s obviously not working how it’s supposed to work.” 

“People are motivated to make their communities better and to protect from potential threats to the people in their communities and around them,” Kohl-Riggs added. “That energy is contagious… we can build strong, resilient local strategies to combat national threats.”

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

Arthur Kohl-Riggs finds comfort in Madison’s ‘third spaces’ is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Today we’re launching Public Square, an occasional photography series introducing your neighbors from across Wisconsin. 

The project aims to highlight the roles people play in their communities throughout the state. In one story, we might profile residents finding solutions to issues facing their cities and towns. In another, we may share someone’s unique perspective on where they fit into their community. 

Throughout the project, we’ll ask people the same questions and make photographs in a similar style — taking something of an informal visual census of the state. We’ll ask:

• What do you love about Wisconsin, and what might you want to fix? 
• What issues do you care about, and how do they impact your life? 
• Where do you find community, and how do you feel about the future? 

Finally, we’ll ask who else we should talk to and where we should next travel so our project can continue fostering connections across the state. At Wisconsin Watch, we want to do more than tell stories of people facing challenges. We want to share your everyday moments of joy, reflection and curiosity. It’s what makes this state great.

Meet your first neighbor here: Arthur Kohl-Riggs, an optimistic practitioner of handstands who works as a legal investigator and once earned thousands of votes as a protest candidate for governor. 

If you know of anyone in your community who we should feature in this visual project, please email me at jtimmerman@wisconsinwatch.org.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

Public Square: Portraits of your neighbors from across Wisconsin is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.