Chicago Trims CREATE Rail Projects

Chicago’s package of construction projects to untangle a time-wasting spaghetti bowl of freight and passenger rail lines officially got a little smaller, but it remains a huge plan that is widely viewed as crucial to the nation’s rail network.

The multi-year plan is called CREATE, for Chicago Region Environmental and Transportation Efficiency. Several months after serving notice that it planned to shrink the total number of projects from 78 to 71, the program finalized that process.

Still, the trim “doesn’t have a significant impact on the total” cost of the program, which is forecast at approximately $3 billion, said Lawrence Wilson, CREATE program manager for the Illinois Department of Transportation.

The estimated savings from cutting the list of projects is about $70 million, he said.

The rail industry considers CREATE a key investment, since Chicago is the continent’s premier rail hub where all the largest railroads converge. It is also a slow-down zone, where trains that roll in at good speeds from across the United States and Canada find they may take a day to transit the city’s few miles. CREATE is designed to change that.

The changed project list stems from the decision by Canadian National Railway to acquire the suburban short line Elgin, Joliet & Eastern Railway, and over time shift onto EJ&E tracks a lot of the freight traffic CN now routes through the congested city center. CN acquired the short line early this year.

CREATE organized its construction needs around several corridors, and CN’s were on the northern tier of its planned central corridor. Now, with CN’s shift, the program will be able to shed some of that work but will still have to make changes to the corridor’s more costly southern tier.

Wilson said the savings come from avoiding planned upgrades to some CSX Transportation tracks in the central corridor, building a new line segment for CN and investing to reactivate another unused rail line that was part of the initial plan.

Contact John D. Boyd at jboyd@joc.com.