Official says cargo route under Detroit River is expected in 5 years
(The following story by Matt Helms appeared on the Bloomberg Businessweek website on June 18, 2010.)
DETROIT, Mich. — A public-private partnership in Ontario said it has set in motion plans to build a new rail tunnel under the Detroit River that can handle double-stacked rail cars and freight too tall for the 101-year-old existing tunnel.
The partnership includes the Windsor Port Authority; Borealis Infrastructure, a division of the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System, and Canadian Pacific Railway.
The agencies said they formed the Continental Rail Gateway and filed paperwork to kick off a two-year environmental review in Canada, a process also under way in the U.S.
“We would hope that no more than five years from today we’ll be in operation,” David Cree, the Port Authority’s president and CEO, said Thursday.
The new tunnel would be near the existing tunnel. Cree said geological surveys will be used to determine whether it’s built upstream or downstream from the current tunnel.
Construction of the $400-million tunnel would take about three years and create about 2,200 construction-related jobs, Cree said.
The rail tunnel opened in 1909 and now carries about 350,000 rail cars a day, a level supporters say would increase because the new tunnel leaves room for freight the old tunnel can’t handle. It’s owned by CP Rail and Borealis.
The coalition said a bigger tunnel is crucial for plans to make the Detroit-Windsor area a major logistics hub, tying in rail, freeways, air traffic as well as Great Lakes shipping. The coalition said rail travel handled about 16% of trade between the U.S. and Canada in 2008, up from 9% in 2000.
Marge Byington, the coalition’s government relations director, said the rail tunnel handles about $20 billion a year in trade, a number that would “increase exponentially” with the new tunnel’s capacity.
Cree said the tunnel could be used for high-speed rail and is “a wonderful natural connection between Quebec City and Chicago.”