CHICAGO — Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker led an entourage of local and national political firepower Thursday in touting Amtrak’s application for federal funding for the Chicago Hub project, a more than $1.1 billion plan to improve Chicago Union Station and routes into the city.
The request to the Federal Railroad Administration for an $872.8 million Federal-State Partnership grant would be combined with a 20% match drawn from Amtrak; the states of Illinois and Michigan; Metra; the City of Chicago; the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning; and Cook County, Ill.; for a total of $218.2 million. The total funding would significantly upgrade operations, platforms, and passenger flow at Union Station; reconfigure track alignments on Chicago’s south side; and extend a passing track near Dowagiac, Mich.
A complete description of the improvements is available on the Amtrak website.
Pritzker’s announcement, from the roof of a parking garage with a view of a now-inoperative St. Charles Air Line bridge, was accompanied by remarks from officials including U.S. Sens. Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth (both D-Ill.); Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson; Amtrak Board Chairman Anthony Coscia, and Metra Executive Director Jim Derwinski. Pritzker says the lineup of support is “a joint effort to present our case in Washington.” The FRA plans to award Federal-State Partnership grants this fall.
Last year, Amtrak and its partners made an unsuccessful bid to secure more than $250 million from the National Infrastructure Project Assistance, or Mega Program [“Amtrak unveils infrastructure plan …,” Trains News Wire, June 10, 2022].
That request required a 50% match, but would have provided mostly planning funds. Ray Lang, Amtrak’s vice president of state-supported business development, explains the new Federal-State Partnership grant “contains about a $115 million match from Amtrak; our partners took that up to over $200 million.” The higher funding level, should the grant be awarded, means more money will be available for construction.
Lang says Amtrak “still needs to go through the process to plan the design of the connection to the St. Charles Air Line — which is probably 18 to 24 months to do that before construction can start — but some of the construction in Union Station itself can begin within months of the award.”
High Speed Rail Alliance Executive Director Rick Harnish tells News Wire that winning the Chicago Hub grant is the first step in facilitating his organization’s CrossRail Chicago plan of linking the McCormick Place Convention Center and downtown through Union Station to O’Hare, first proposed 10 years ago. “I was excited to hear how the governor and others eloquently described the benefits of the one-seat ride, which is helpful in finally getting cooperation between all of the agencies that need to be involved,” Harnish says.
Coscia: ‘An opportunity to make a significant change’
Coscia, in his remarks, said, “the heart of our national network is Union Station. It is not just our hub, it’s our heartbeat. If we are going to enter an entirely new generation of rail travel in this country, we’re going to begin it here, and we’re either going to succeed here on the national mission, or we’re going to fail here. And that’s something we’ve shared with our colleagues in Washington, the Biden Administration and Congress.”
He notes, “The St. Charles Airline bridge behind me represents the opportunity to reduce travel times by 15 minutes and open up corridors that we currently don’t have … and remedy many things that have not been done in the past.”
In a subsequent News Wire interview, Coscia explains, “If you look at what we are capable of accomplishing with passenger rail in this country, it really is using the national system as an anchor to draw all that together which supports the state-supported and long-distance traveler and creates city pairs where we haven’t had good, reliable continual service.
He adds, “We know the triweekly trains are not optimal. We’ve underinvested in passenger rail for decades. In the ramp-up to the infrastructure bill we had improved a lot of the operating performance at Amtrak, only to free up money to put more money into capital and lessen the operating subsidy. The reality is that the numbers we need are far greater than both of those things. Now we have an opportunity to make a significant change in it. We’ve slept on this so long that [the need for] billions is not the whole number, but it is something that will make a big change.”
