What if freight trains skirted suburbs via new rural railroad?
In the 21st century, the
plan by Great Lakes Transportation Inc. is rare to the point of being
unbelievable: Building an $8 billion, 278-mile-long, two-track freight
railroad through northeastern Illinois.
.
• Fewer -- or maybe even no --
potentially explosive crude-oil trains rolling through crowded suburban
and city neighborhoods, such as downtown Aurora.
• Fewer Metra and Amtrak
passenger trains held up by "freight train interference" as trains on
Chicago's overcrowded rail system pile up at various interchanges and
rail yard entrances.
• Fewer semitrailer trucks on Chicago-area expressways.
But most of the more than 400
people who showed up Tuesday morning at a federal "scoping" hearing in
Belvidere weren't thinking about convenience to people living 50 miles
to the east in the suburbs. Many wore stickers showing their opposition
to the project, called the Great Lakes Basin Rail Line.
Instead, they told the U.S. Surface Transportation Board's environmental
studies staff that such a railroad would split up farms that have been
owned by their families for 100 years. That it would threaten
underground water supplies with pollution from spilled chemicals, would
slow local ambulance crews and firefighters, would take the world's best
soil out of agricultural production, would lower their property values,
could cause drainage problems on their farmland and would fill their
quiet rural townships with train noise.
Great Lakes Basin Transportation
Inc. is headed by former software entrepreneur Frank Patton and
reportedly is supported by 14 investors. The proposed railroad is
designed to give the area's six "Class I" railroads -- BNSF, Union
Pacific, Norfolk Southern, CSX, Canadian National and Canadian Pacific,
plus the small Wisconsin & Southern Railway -- a way to send
long-distance freight trains around metropolitan Chicago rather than
through it.
The former Elgin, Joliet &
Eastern Railway, bought by Canadian National Railway in a hotly debated
deal in 2009, is a one-track line that runs from Waukegan to Gary via
Barrington, Hoffman Estates, Bartlett, Wayne, West Chicago and Aurora.
It also connects the six big railroads' various Chicago-area lines. If
the other railroads were spokes in a wheel whose center is downtown
Chicago, the former EJ&E would be the rim of that wheel.
Before CN took over and started
using the EJ&E to connect the various spoke lines CN owns, the
EJ&E was nicknamed "Chicago's Outer Belt."
The proposed Great Lakes Basin
Line could be called "Chicago's Outer Outer Belt," another rim
connecting all those spokes. It would be built through farm country,
purposely bypassing cities and towns but intersecting with other
railroads in more than 25 places.
The line would begin in northwest
Indiana, head west between Kankakee and Joliet, then go north to west
of Morris, Yorkville and DeKalb. South of Rockford, it would split in
two, with one branch heading west of Rockford and one branch reaching
north through the Belvidere area into southern Wisconsin.
David Navecky, an STB
environmental analyst who emceed Tuesday's hearing, said the board had
already held six hearings and three more were scheduled -- in Rockford
Tuesday night, in Rochelle Wednesday and in Seneca on Thursday. An
"online hearing" also will be held on April 27, and the board will
accept written comments through June 15.
The next step is an environmental
impact statement, which will recommend whether the full board should
approve the project, recommend "mitigation" for specific environmental
problems if the project is approved, and perhaps recommend alternative
routes. That will be followed by more public hearings.
It will probably be two to three years before the impact statement is finally finished, Navecky said.
The full board then must decide
whether to give Great Lakes Transportation a green light to start
acquiring land and laying track.
After Tuesday's hearing, Navecky
said Great Lakes estimates the line could handle up to 110 trains a day.
But he said the STB still needs to hear estimates about how many trains
would be using each segment of the line. He said the board also has not
yet received comments on the proposal from any of the existing
railroads that would be its customers
Above is from: http://www.dailyherald.com/article/20160419/news/160418586/
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