Windsor Locks Moves Its Station to Main Street: $121.2 Million, 31 Weekday Trains and a 12-Minute Bus to Bradley

The short version: Windsor Locks is moving its train station into the heart of town. The newly built station at 231 Main Street opens Sunday, October 18 for CTrail Hartford Line and Amtrak service, state officials announced at a ribbon cutting this week — the centerpiece of a $121.2 million project that also adds frequent bus service to Bradley International Airport, with weekend airport connections the town has never had. For a community whose old station sat south of downtown, it is a bet that putting trains and buses on Main Street changes what the center of town can become.

What opens on Sunday

The station relocates passenger rail and bus service from the old stop south of downtown to a central site near housing, businesses, Town Hall and the public library. Riders get an approximately 500-foot platform with fully accessible level boarding, heated waiting areas, overhead canopies, Wi-Fi, seating, ticket vending machines, passenger information displays and emergency call boxes, plus a 9,500-square-foot station utility building. Outside, there are 160 parking spaces, electric vehicle chargers, bicycle racks and a dedicated bus pickup and drop-off area, and an electric snow-melting system for Connecticut winters. Service is not token, either: 31 trains on weekdays, 23 on Saturdays and 24 on Sundays, with the first departures at 4:53 a.m. on weekdays and 6:19 a.m. on weekends. Amtrak's Hartford Line, Northeast Regional, Valley Flyer and Vermonter trains will stop alongside CTrail, whose railroad is owned by Amtrak, the line's owner working with the state on the project.

The airport link is the real upgrade

The piece of this project most likely to change daily life is a bus. CTtransit Route 24 will run daily between the station and Bradley International Airport — a trip of about 12 minutes to Terminal A — every 20 minutes on weekdays and every 40 minutes on weekends, joined by Routes 96E and 905 Express. Before this station, the airport that sits in Windsor Locks was awkward to reach without a car from the town that hosts it; now the train, the bus and the plane connect in one place, with weekend airport service added for the first time. Amtrak's own figures show the old Windsor Locks station served 35,576 riders in fiscal 2025, and state Transportation Commissioner Garrett Eucalitto projects 43,000 passenger trips a year by 2030. Those numbers explain the ambition: this is being built as a regional hub that happens to be in a small town, not as a small-town stop with regional hopes.

The money and the Main Street bet

The overall project costs $121.2 million — $46.1 million for station and roadway work and $75.1 million for track and pedestrian bridge improvements — funded about 85 percent by the state and 15 percent federally. Beyond the platform, the work rebuilds roughly 1,800 feet of Main Street and adds a new pedestrian bridge over the Windsor Locks Canal, and track construction will continue after opening day, with full completion expected in spring 2028. Gov. Ned Lamont framed the move at the ribbon cutting as correcting what he called the missing link in downtown's redevelopment, arguing that bringing rail and bus service into the heart of town connects residents to jobs and travelers to the airport, and encourages the housing and private investment the town wants next. That word — downtown — is the whole theory of the project. The old station served trains. The new one is meant to serve a place, anchoring the street Windsor Locks is trying to rebuild around.

How Connecticut is selling it

Amtrak joined the governor and the state Department of Transportation at the ribbon cutting, and its infrastructure chief, Warren LeBeau, praised the partners for delivering a modern, accessible station with track and signal work behind it. The state and Amtrak both put the station in a larger Connecticut rail story: Amtrak is also replacing the 119-year-old Connecticut River Bridge and contributing to the Walk Bridge replacement in Norwalk, two of the biggest rail projects in the Northeast. Hartford Line riders further south already know the pattern from the stations that opened when service launched — level-boarding platforms, downtown footprints, buses waiting at the curb. Windsor Locks was the line's awkward gap: an airport town with a station in the wrong place. Starting Sunday, that gap closes, and the line's stops read the way they were drawn up — a chain of town centers between New Haven, Hartford and Springfield.

What to watch after opening day

Opening day is the ceremony; the tests come after. The first is ridership — whether the 35,000-plus annual riders at the old site grow toward the state's 43,000-trip projection once the airport bus and the downtown location start compounding. The second is the bus connection itself: a 12-minute ride only changes behavior if the schedules line up with trains and flights, and the 20- and 40-minute headways will be judged on exactly that. The third is Main Street: the state has spent heavily to put foot traffic at its front doors, and whether businesses, housing and investment follow is the measure Lamont invited everyone to use. And the construction story is not finished — track work continues into a spring 2028 completion, so riders will be using a new station inside an active project for more than a year. For now, though, Windsor Locks gets the thing it has been promised in renderings for years: on Sunday morning, the first trains stop on Main Street.