How does society do hard things? Re-creating Uptown Normal took a quarter century and it's still not quite done. Downtown Bloomington revitalization has taken decades and is, just now, getting out of the starting gate. Efforts like the Bloomington Public Library expansion had several trial balloons unceremoniously pop before the project truly rose into the air.
It turns out these heavy lifts have a lot in common. In Part 1 of our series Hard Things, WGLT unpacks the generational project that brought faster passenger train service to Illinois.
It took more than 30 years to bring 110 mile an hour passenger rail service to the Chicago to St. Louis corridor. That's a long haul of feasibility studies, planning, scrapping for money, and bargaining with public and private entities even before actual construction began. The U.S. Department of Transportation designated Chicago-St. Louis as a high-speed rail corridor in 1992. That came after lengthy feasibility studies. To build enthusiasm for preliminary work on the project, supporters brought a German-made high speed rail engine called the ICE Train through Bloomington-Normal in 1993.
Chris Koos sits on the national board of Amtrak and is the longtime mayor of Normal. Even with that tenure, the passenger rail project predates him in office. Koos said every big project must have three things.
“I would say vision, planning, and tenacity," said Koos.
Early studies spoke to the potential of a 110-mph network out of Chicago. The studies said there was a market for higher speed rail. They said it would improve air quality. And there would be an economic benefit to the state and the communities connected by the service.
Joe Szabo headed the Federal Railroad Administration during the Obama administration. He started out as a union guy. Szabo said that analysis was important to bring other people to embrace the unified vision of rail service that would cut a big chunk of time off a car trip.
“It started with those of us, myself included, in the union arena, meeting weekly with those in the environmental community and thinking about how we build this out. And it was from there that we started sitting down with the president of the Illinois Chamber of Commerce, and the Chicago Chamber of Commerce,” said Szabo.
He had also been a south suburban mayor in Chicagoland. He went to mayors along the rail corridor and to the Illinois Municipal League. After that, Szabo added university presidents to the coalition. They saw their Chicago area students used the train to get to campus.
Some doubted the economic analysis. Koos said speed alone is not enough.
“You know 110 [mph] service doesn’t exist on its own. You also have to have frequency of that service, and you also have to have on-time performance of that service. If one of those three is missing, the other two don’t stand on their own,” said Koos.
There were two prerequisites for success in getting 110 mph passenger rail. Szabo said without both of them, it wouldn't have happened.
The first was doubling the number of state-supported Amtrak trains on the corridor. The economic claim had been the more frequent the trains were, the more people would use it because they have options. If a business meeting-time changes or runs over, you don’t want to get stuck at the end of the business day.
When the hearings to expand state-supported rail came, Szabo said all that work assembling a broad coalition that bought into the vision made passage less hard.
“It’s almost like once we pushed that boulder uphill, it started rolling downhill with its own momentum,” said Szabo.
The idea of frequency of trains increasing use was orthodox and long-known transit theory, but supporters needed to dispel doubts about the economic benefit case.
“And watching the ridership explode exponentially. I mean like within three months, ridership more than doubled on all the state service. And it just continued to build month after month after month,” said Szabo.
Even though there were more trains per day along the corridor, they still couldn't go faster than 79 miles an hour.
The second element that made the project achievable came a year or so after the increase in the number of daily trains. It was the election of Barack Obama as president and the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment plan to simulate the economy following the national financial crisis. Obama wanted to make passenger rail a part of that investment.
Former Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood of Illinois said it was the first time any White House had put down an $8 billion marker on higher speed rail. LaHood said Illinois got a significant chunk of that money.
“More important than anything, it requires collaboration. Big projects get done when smart people put their minds together, agree on the plan, and then begin to implement it,” said LaHood.
LaHood said the administration of then-Gov. Pat Quinn had already demonstrated it had skin in the game by boosting the number of trains. And so, for the first time in "eons," Joe Szabo says federal funding was made available to help state DOTs implement railroad projects.
He said sure, it was luck, but the state was ready. The analysis had been done decades earlier. Then the proof of concept came with growth in ridership and the state partnership commitment to more trains. Szabo said, though, “you never know when the window of opportunity is going to open and if you are not prepared you are unable to pass through.”
And there was still a lot of work to do. Faster train speeds mean you need a better rail bed. You needed to close a number of grade crossings. You needed fences to stop pedestrians and wildlife from getting on the tracks. You even needed better crossing gates so motorists can't make fatally poor choices to drive around the gate.
Ray LaHood said any major infrastructure upgrade takes years of work and many phases.
"What you find with these projects, a few people wake up every day and the only thing they think about is how do we get this project over the finish line and how do we keep it going," said LaHood.
Even after all that, it took years more to start running faster trains from Chicago to St. Louis.
The corridor shares traffic between passenger and freight trains. Amtrak operates one. Union Pacific, Canadian National, and other companies operate the other kind. If trains are going that fast there's a lot less time to make a decision to stop if a slow freighter is ahead. When the vision began decades earlier, Chris Koos of Normal said the planners knew there had to be a way to let engineers know exactly where a train ahead of them is. It didn't yet exist.
“That primarily had to do with the GPS system called positive train control which is a safety issue for trains traveling at that speed with the amount of traffic on the tracks,” said Koos.
Europe decided to go with a single system for both passenger and freight trains. The U.S. said every rail company could choose its own system if they could talk to each other. Joe Szabo said developing and then testing the technology for "interoperability" delayed the timeline a couple more years.
Szabo said the approach Europe took made it easier to coordinate, but harder to change. The U.S. path encouraged innovation and cost control. He said it was a tremendously complex undertaking for the entire industry.
“Never anywhere on this planet had implementation to this scale, to this magnitude been attempted, and it’s important to get it right,” said Szabo.
Szabo said if you don’t get it right you lower the capacity of both freight and passenger traffic…leading to delays and maybe safety problems.
Another thing, Ray LaHood said big honking infrastructure projects are always very costly — billions in the case of faster rail service. You must embrace uncertainty.
“It’s very difficult to really calculate what it’s really going to cost until you begin the project, begin the work and try and stay on a schedule,” said LaHood.
When you get to the finish line, it might not be the same place you thought you were going all those years ago when you started. In the case of 110 mph passenger rail, Chris Koos said the vision is, as yet, incomplete.
“When the 110 plan was identified there would have been two more trains a day in and out of Bloomington-Normal. That kind of disappeared in the (Governor Bruce) Rauner years, and I think there are still holes in the schedule that would certainly increase usage of that system,” said Koos.
It's also true that when society does a hard thing, it can be a continual process that does not, in fact, have an end. Joe Szabo said you may have to keep renewing and rebuilding, once it's in place. 110 mph service started just two years ago. Now, people are talking about true high-speed rail and starting to study the potential for a 220-mph corridor.
Coming Tuesday: In Part 2 of the series Hard Things, WGLT considers a library, Uptown, Downtown, rural health clinics, and electronic birth and death records.
