I may have mentioned this before, but Phillip Longman’s Washington Monthly article on freight rail infrastructure is fantastic. It includes this quote:
Another notorious set of choke points is in Chicago, America’s rail capital, which is visited by some 1,200 trains a day. Built in the nineteenth century by noncooperating private companies, lines coming from the East still have no or insufficient connections with those coming from the West. Consequently, thousands of containers on their way elsewhere must be unloaded each day, “rubber-wheeled” across the city’s crowded streets by truck, and reloaded onto other trains. It takes forty-eight hours for a container to travel five miles across Chicago, longer than it does to get there from New York. This entire problem could be fixed for just $1.5 billion, with benefits including not just faster shipping times and attendant economic development, but drastically reduced road traffic, energy use, and pollution.
PBS’s News Hour had a short piece last week on the Chicago bottleneck that’s worth checking out:
PBS puts the costs at $2.5B, but either way, it’s a steal to fix such an obvious bottleneck in the country’s freight infrastructure
Oh yes, this could be a cheap and easy fix- unless the people in Chicago don’t want it fixed.
After all, who wants to stand by the side of the railroad and wave to the engineer as millions of tons of freight roll through, off to feed the commerce of one of your greatest competitor cities?
Imagining that this situation results from a lack of rail connections around Chicago isn’t realistic. The railroads of yesteryear probably moved ten times the tonnage around Chicago on the Belt Line and other connecting roads. Think of the ore for Pittsburgh from the Missabe Range, the pigs that famously did not get out of their cars in Chicago, and the Indiana Harbor 0-8-0 switchers. Believe it, freight moved, and they usually didn’t break bulk to move it.
A better way to learn about this would probably be to check some updated maps and see where the BNSF and the SP touch fingertips with the roads of the east. It seems safe to assume that Chicago holds sway as far south as Rock Island, and it may be that the traffic being talked about is from LA and San Diego and the Bay Area.
At the bottom line, you probably don’t want to build a new alignment to put 50+ mph freight movements through the city of Chicago. Sure, in the past, 100 roads converged on the town. Now, more like four or five.
And where Longman got the idea that those companies were “noncooperating” I do not know. Not the most informed comment he could have made about the situation.