(The following story by Bob Okon appeared on the Herald News website on September 17.)
CHICAGO — What Will County sees as railroad misery would be a relief in Cook County.
That’s not really what was said by John Morton, environmental team leader for regulators overseeing the Canadian National Railway plan to buy the Elgin, Joliet & Eastern Railway.
But Morton did paint a picture last week at a public hearing on the CN plan that showed the opposite impact in outlying suburbs and those closer to Chicago.
“The major change is that they (CN) are taking traffic that’s operating in the city now and putting it on the EJ&E arc around the city,” Morton said.
He gave such examples as noise impact. About 3,000 residents along the EJ&E will hear more noise.
But 2,700 residents in close-in suburbs along CN tracks would hear less noise because of the shift in train traffic, according to the governments study of the potential impact of the CN acquisition.
Indeed, while many political and community leaders in Will County and other suburban areas are fighting ferociously to stop the CN plan. The project has gained broad support in Cook County suburbs that expect fewer trains if the acquisition goes through. Joliet officials have noted this overall trade-off in impact as a reason for becoming the first, and so far only, community to come to terms with CN over the railroad’s future obligations to ease the impact of higher traffic. Federal regulators would likely balance political support and opposition along with the practical impact in deciding in favor of the CN plan, city officials concluded.
But local officials speaking at last week’s public hearing definitely didn’t see a fair trade-off in the shift of rail traffic to outlying suburbs.”
“CN’s proposal to redirect trains from the densely populated suburbs near Chicago to the densely populated suburbs in the collar counties is short-sighted,” Lee Ann Goodson, a Will County Board member from Plainfield, said at the hearing Thursday in Joliet. Frankfort Mayor Jim Holland suggested that CN take its trains farther out by building a new railroad rather than shift traffic onto the EJ&E.
One of the main problems confronting Holland and other mayors is how to deal with the increased traffic problems that will come with three times or four times more trains at local crossings. One answer is to build railroad overpasses to separate the trains from the roads, but the cost of a single separated crossing can easily top $50 million, mayors say. Holland argued that taxpayers would be subsidizing the CN acquisition, because the railroad only wants to pay 5 to 10 percent of the costs of separated crossings and only at selected locations.
If CN had to pay the full costs of those crossings, Holland argued, “They would find it cheaper to build a whole new railroad farther from the suburbs.”
New Lenox Mayor Tim Baldermann said in negotiations with CN the railroad basically told the village to look to the state and federal government for help financing improvements at its five crossings.
The problem with that, Baldermann said: “In this nation and this state there is no funding.”