Great Lakes Basin filed with STB May 1 – and wants to build a tollway!

We’ve talked about the Great Lakes Basin Railroad (GLB) before. It’s the approximately 275-mile railroad proposed by its backers for a bypass around congested Chicago.

GLB reached a milestone on May 1, 2017,when it filed its application to construct the railroad with the Surface Transportation Board (STB).

The project has evolved significantly since we last discussed it (March 14, 2017 - Check archives.) It now includes a toll road.

Everybody has known for some time that a new limited-access superhighway was needed to direct traffic away from the congested corridor created by the now sixty-plus year old Tri State Tollway (Interstates 94, 294, 80) to reach the southwest and western suburbs of Chicago without going through the heavily industrialized Northwestern Indiana and Chicago’s near South Side. Hence, some years ago, the so-called Illiana Expressway was conceived. It was to connect with Interstate 65 in Indiana and Interstate 55 south of Joliet, Illinois, in the process crossing I-57.

Because it’s proposed routing is mostly rural, the Illiana has had a hard time getting from concept to reality. Environmental groups oppose it, primarily because they oppose everything, and have found problems with the expressway’s permitting that has stalled it in the courts.

So along comes GLB, which must get substantially the same kind of environmental approvals as Illiana, and tacks on a tollway. Not a bad tactical move: Preempt the Illiana and, at the same time, stand to profit from both truck and rail freight that bypasses Chicago.

Illiana was to be a publicly financed project, and, although that’s unclear at this writing, not necessarily a toll highway. Both GLB Railroad and GLB’s tollway are to be investor financed. The public outlook for an investor-financed tollway is theoretically brighter than for that of a freeway. The Illinois Toll Highway Authority has been able to pour a lot of money from tolls back into maintenance and growth, keeping the system, for the most part, vital and well-maintained. Given the right corporate structure, an investor-financed highway might do the same.

The railroad and the newly proposed tollway have other opposition. First and foremost, the railroads going through Chicago have already committed time and funds to the CREATE project and other bypass-like projects in which they would participate and reap the rewards. A new railroad threatens to shorten the players’ hauls by an average of 100 miles. That’s for the connecting railroads.

There are also the belt railroads, which would each lose some business altogether. They are Belt Railway of Chicago (owned by six Class Is), Indiana Harbor Belt (owned by Conrail Shared Assets and Canadian Pacific), and CN’s former Elgin Joliet & Eastern. The belt players are not going to sit idly by and assume that their non-owning Class I objectors will not put traffic on a fleshed-out GLB. They will band together in opposition with the objective of making sure the GLB dies before any useable part of it is built.

Of course, all of these players, the belts and the Class Is, will continue to strategize, in case the objections don’t work. It’s always possible that a fully realized GLB will someday be purchased from the GLB investors by any or all of them. In fact, it’s likely that strategy is in the back of any GLB investor who knows how to manage investment risk.

Unlike the railroad part of GLB’s proposal, the toll highway part, beyond any environmental objections, is uncharted territory. The general public in America is not used to large private investments in public infrastructure, unless those investments are leveraged with tax dollars. As far as is known so far, GLB isn’t looking for tax money to finance any of their project. Any public opposition is likely to fall along political lines. (See below.)

In the wings is an ancillary project, to be run by a subsidiary of GLB, and that is participation and support in the development of a South Suburban Airport to take the traffic burdens off of O’Hare and Midway. Theoretically to be located in eastern Will County north of the proposed railroad, a near-Manteno airport has been in the pie-sky planning stage of at least two decades now. This, in my opinion, is the least likely part of GLB’s ambitious plan.

The kicker? Illinois is a politically liberal state with a long history of politicians leveraging as much power through public works as is legally, and sometimes borderline illegally, possible. The political establishment of the counties of Cook and Will know how to play a hard game. The fiercest opposition may yet be political, as local and state politicians realize that they will have no control, other than regulatory, over the ultimate GLB trifecta of road, rail and air.

Personally, I’d like to see GLB happen. It might teach the politicians a thing or two, but, beyond that, it just might benefit Chicago and the railroads that run to it.

©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.)