(The following column by Guy Tridgell appeared on the Chicago Sun-Times website on April 27.)
CHICAGO — The proposal seems simple enough.
For $300 million, the Canadian National Railway asks to buy the EJ&E railroad tracks encircling the Chicago area — moving traffic around instead of through the city.
The little-used EJ&E tracks, cutting through smaller suburbs on the outskirts of the region, get pressed into service.
The chronic train congestion plaguing Chicago and its interior suburbs is reduced.
Everyone’s happy.
But in real life, the issue is much more complicated than that.
Lines are drawn
CN says a freight train can take more than 24 hours to make the 30-mile trip through Chicago, often idling for hours as it waits. Inner-ring communities, places such as Blue Island, Evergreen Park and Chicago’s South Loop and Beverly communities, stand to see a benefit to the sale by having fewer trains tying up traffic and belching diesel fumes when they are reduced to a standstill from the gridlock on the rails. Mayor Daley has endorsed the deal, while urging CN to address suburban concerns.
But in towns sliced by the EJ&E tracks — newer, affluent suburbs such as Frankfort, New Lenox, Mokena and Matteson — the sale to CN is anything but welcome. The four to five trains they are used to dealing with each day will increase by as much as tenfold.
The lines are drawn, rail community vs. non-rail community, and the debate has raged for months.
In appealing to federal regulators to approve the acquisition of the EJ&E, CN officials insist they are not trying to pit one group of suburbs against another. But it is clear they are counting on towns that could gain from the sale as allies.
“We want to get our story out to all of the communities,” CN spokesman Jim Kvedaras said. “Our strategy is to get some balance into the discussion.”
Comments may slow decision
Meanwhile, everyone is waiting for the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Surface Transportation Board to release this spring a report detailing the scope of environmental studies needed before the EJ&E sale can be considered. But more than 3,000 comments from concerned citizens, filed with the board’s offices in Washington, D.C., mean a delay is likely.
On Friday, the Surface Transportation Board announced that in weighing the rail purchase, it would use forecasts of what train traffic would be in 2015, rather than forecasts for 2012, as CN wanted. Opponents of the sale wanted the board to use a projection 25 years out.
The new criteria were included in a board report Friday outlining the potential impacts that will be studied during its environmental analysis of Canadian National’s plans to increase the number of trains on the EJ&E.
The report can be viewed at www.stb.dot.gov.