GLBR now or never? An argument in favor of now

Something called the Great Lakes Basin Railroad (GLBR) has been an idea in the works since 2011. I’ve written about this idea in previous blogs, but here’s a primer:

Great Lakes Basin Transportation, Inc., the brainchild of Frank Patton, a Chicago entrepreneur, but not a railroader, and boasting a number of partners with impressive railroading credentials, is pushing this brand new railroad as the solution to all of the traffic woes inherent to Chicago’s complex network of connecting railroads.

The CREATE (Chicago Region Environmental and Transportation Efficiency) Program, already underway for some 14 years and often seen as hopelessly bogged down, or, at the least, struggling for funding, is another proposed solution. CREATE uses existing railroads and upgrades to them with very little new right of way or main line involved. It depends on public-private partnerships, including capital from the involved railroads, and the infrastructure benefits accrue to the participating railroads.

GLBR (going clockwise around Chicago) is supposed to begin in LaPorte County, Indiana, connecting there to at least half a dozen freight railroads, continue southwest into Kankakee County, and reach it’s southernmost extremity in that county’s western parts. From there, it would circle northwestward to Rochelle, Illinois, thence northward west of Rockford, Illinois and Beloit, Wisconsin, to terminate in Rock County, Wisconsin, northeast of Janesville. A few short branches are contemplated in this mix; notably, south of Rockford and in LaPorte County. In the course of making this great circle around Chicago, the railroad would connect with every major railroad line that radiates out of the Windy City, with the exception of lines connecting Chicago with Milwaukee.

GLBR also requires public participation and investment from the railroads, but also sees itself as an independent belt line that can make money for its investors.

That concludes the primer.

An AP article of March 4, 2017, appearing in the Albuquerque Journal, talks of one problem the CREATE project isn’t designed to solve: Property theft. In some ways, I suppose, relieving slow and stopped trains would remove some of the more obvious opportunities for theft and vandalism.

Not by design, railroads passing through the southeast, south, and west sides of Chicago are also passing through some of the statistically worst areas for property crime. The AP article points out that thefts of new firearms have occurred from stopped trains. Much has been written about the groups of young men who scramble aboard or along with slow-moving trains and break into containers or closed freight cars, stealing anything within. It was probably accident that they stumbled on a shipment of new weapons. Once such a strike occurred, however, I am sure it became incentive for more such activity.

The railroads collectively see this as a bearable insurance loss; a business decision. Surely the local residents do not see it this way, and I don’t think the railroads are cold-hearted by design. It just doesn’t make economic sense for the railroads to spend capital dollars on walls and fences, and payroll dollars on armed guards, for insured losses amounting to a fraction of the total value of freight carried.

Furthermore, there is a very real and practical political consideration: Armed guards shooting somebody breaking into a train would not be taken very well by the community, and would most certainly result in prosecutions, not of the thieves, but of the guards themselves.

In my humble opinion, only GLBR has the near-term potential to solve the problem of slow-moving trains. Both GLBR and CREATE suffer from lack of funding, but CREATE must also do its construction amidst the already existing rail traffic, making things, for the short term, even slower. On the other hand, GLBR would appear to be able to start taking traffic out of the city as soon as some of the major connections are nailed down and track between laid and made safe for new trains. An estimated 110 trains per day could eventually be routed around the city.

An argument against GLBR is that it would be a new railroad, with the new costs of acquiring land, a new set of NIMBYs to deal with, and all the environmental and other government regulations you can imagine. But these are exactly the kind of regulations the Trump administration wants to get rid of.

Here's my closing argument for GLBR. It is just such a project for new infrastructure that the Trump administration seems to have promised the voters, that got Trump elected, and that the voters seems to expect from the president. It has the added benefit of taking crime and guns off the streets of Chicago, a situation not unnoticed by President Trump. GLBR has all of the other benefits of CREATE, and it spreads the associated construction and infrastructure jobs around much more of Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin than the Chicago-only improvement project.

As with many of the other improvements expected from our new administration, it may be now or never.

So I say, GLBR needs more than serious consideration by Chicago and the entire area. It needs a green signal and a powerful push to get its train going.

©2017 – C. A. Turek – mistertrains@gmail.com

(Charles A. Turek is a writer and novelist based in Albuquerque, NM. After four decades working in areas of the insurance industry related to transportation, he now writes on all aspects of American railroading. Charles is a political conservative but believes in public funding of passenger rail as a part of the federal government’s constitutionally conservative obligation to provide for defense and public infrastructure so that private enterprise may flourish.)