I knew a gal from Kalamazoo, her name was sue....

This idea has been kicked around for the last 40 years or so, I remember Dr. Walt Rice, Cal Poly SLO, and Dr. Ronald Scheck at UNM Las Cruces, proposed these sort of connections back in the late 70's and early 80's. This was as part of their analysis of how to create a viable "national" Amtrak system that could potentially achieve full cost recovery.

The strategies they proposed for doing this involved, trains serving, mid and large sized "multiple" urban center to urban center corridors, with high frequency overlapping "short" and "intermediate" distance passenger services, linking those multiple city pair corridors.

The corridor of the Wolverine, with Toronto potentially within a 4 hour plus, trip from the mid sized Michigan cities, and Detroit itself, as well as the mid sized Canadian cities, with trips to and from the US, from Windsor to Toronto, would be the real travel markets, not necessarily "end-to-end trips, from Chicago to Toronto. Turning over those seats with lots of mid and short distance rail passengers.

I understand there are some substantial hurdles in running through service via Detroit that were alluded to in the story.

Do I seem to vaguely recall, somewhere in the dim recesses of what's left of my brain cells, that at one time Amtrak did run a through (or maybe a Via connecting service?) Chicago Toronto service, mayve via (IIRC??)Sarnia?