(The following story by Mary Wisniewski appeared on the Chicago Tribune website on November 10.)
CHICAGO — You can wait until Amtrak gets the money to put a train station where you want it. Or you can do like local developer Jimmy Gierczyk is doing, and build your own.
Gierczyk has been investing for years in developments in New Buffalo, Mich., a growing Harbor Country getaway for well-heeled Chicagoans. He wanted an Amtrak train station right in the middle of downtown. The current station is about a mile away.
Gierczyk, who designed the Tinley Park World Music Theatre, broke ground on the new train station Oct. 31 and hopes to complete it before Christmas. He spent $1.5 million on parking lots and a 250-foot railroad platform, right by his condo and luxury townhome development.
“You can walk out the door of my condominium and you can catch the train,” he said.
This is the only privately developed Amtrak station in recent memory, according to Mike Franke, assistant vice president of state and commuter partnerships for Amtrak. He called the station a “great opportunity to service a growing area.”
There are currently two rail lines that pass through New Buffalo on the way to Chicago. One is on CSX-owned track — an Amtrak train using that rail line stops twice a day on the outskirts of New Buffalo. The other is an Amtrak-owned line that also connects to Kalamazoo, Detroit and Port Huron — but only passes through New Buffalo’s downtown and does not stop.
It was that second line that intrigued Gierczyk. He’s been working on getting a station for it for five years. The second line will have four New Buffalo stops a day, seven days a week — one in each direction in the morning and one in each direction in the afternoon.
The trip from Chicago to New Buffalo on the Amtrak line will be nonstop. One of the two trips back to Chicago will be nonstop, while the other would have flag stops in Michigan City and Hammond, Ind. The commute takes a little over an hour.
Gierczyk ran into some bumps in the road on the way to getting his station — he presold homes near the station because people wanted the train stop. But the money had to be refunded because the new station was delayed over issues like how high the platform needed to be from the tracks.
The line that runs through New Buffalo’s downtown is on a federally designated high-speed corridor, which means it’s being gradually improved to handle higher speeds.
In the next six months, Amtrak expects that the speed between New Buffalo and Kalamazoo will be 110 mph. The route couldn’t run high-speed all the way from New Buffalo to Chicago, though — the section between Porter, Ind., and Chicago is too busy with other trains.
Asked why he was willing to spend his own money on a public project, Gierczyk said the new station would help him market New Buffalo real estate to Chicago buyers. “The only way for us to get this done was for us to do it,” he said.