(The following appeared on the Chicago Tribune website on March 15, 2011.)
CHICAGO — A U.S. appeals court in Washington on Tuesday upheld a ruling by federal regulators requiring the Canadian National Railway to pay the majority of the costs for building two key railroad overpasses in the Chicago suburbs.
It was a welcomed reinforcement for members of the communities affected.
CN’s purchase of the Elgin, Joliet & Eastern Railway was opposed from the start by a number of suburbs along the EJ&E, which forms a 198-mile arc around Chicago from Waukegan to Joliet to northwest Indiana.
The suburbs contended that CN’s plans to triple or quadruple the number of trains on the EJ&E would cause grade-crossing congestion, endanger the public by reducing response times from emergency responders and diminish the quality of life along the railroad.
Drivers throughout the region also faced waits of 10 minutes or longer nearly 1,500 times at suburban crossings along the former EJ&E in November and December 2009 — 100 times more delays than CN told federal regulators had occurred, according to an audit released last year.
The Surface Transportation Board attempted to mitigate some of those concerns by ordering CN to pay the bulk of the cost of the two overpasses where crossing congestion would be the highest.
The full story is on the Chicago Tribune website.