All of us who love nature were cheered by the news that Starved Rock State Park is getting $37.2 million in essential improvements. Crumbling trails are being reinforced with fresh crushed stone, the park’s handsome wooden bridges and limestone walls are being overhauled or replaced, and the invisible but vital plumbing and drainage systems are being modernized.
There’s only one problem that Starved Rock’s do-over doesn’t address: capacity. The most popular destination in Illinois’ state park system can’t handle any additional visitors during the peak summer season because its parking lot is full and cannot be expanded. More parking — even if a garage were built — would degrade the fragile natural environment the visitors come to see.
The park itself is not crowded. Its trails and groves and canyons can accommodate many more visitors. What Starved Rock can’t absorb is more cars.
So how are visitors supposed to get there?
The simple answer: by train. The main line of the former Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad runs along the north shore of the Illinois River, and there’s space for a platform in downtown Utica right across the river from Starved Rock. If trains were running, a bus could shuttle passengers across the river and into the park in about seven minutes.
The problem is that restoring the Rock Island for passenger service is going to cost a lot of money. The venerable Rock went bankrupt in the late 1970s and was liquidated in 1980, with its weaker lines abandoned and the stronger ones sold off to other railroads or to startups. The 40-mile Chicago-Joliet segment went to Metra, the 74 miles from Joliet to Bureau were sold to the giant Eastern freight carrier CSX Corp. and the rest of the Illinois trackage out to the Quad Cities was sold to the startup Iowa Interstate Railroad, which also got the 47-mile branch from Bureau to Peoria.
Unfortunately, none of this track except the Metra segment can be used for passenger trains. It’s “dark territory” lacking the automatic block signals that prevent train collisions. If a passenger train were to operate, its top speed would be 59 mph, too slow to compete with highway travel. Rebuilding the Rock to modern passenger-train standards — 110 to 135 mph, hourly service, frequent passing tracks, grade-crossing enhancements, and new stations and platforms — would probably will cost more than $1 billion.
But the stakes are bigger than just Chicago-Starved Rock. In a scandal underreported for decades, Illinois’ two largest cities outside Chicago, Peoria and the Quad Cities, each with about 400,000 residents, are not connected to Chicago by passenger train service, even though lesser communities are:
- Carbondale, 330 miles from Chicago with only 26,000 residents and a Southern Illinois University enrollment of 11,000 students, enjoys two daily state-sponsored Amtrak trains to Chicago (plus service from Amtrak’s long-distance City of New Orleans). Yet the Quad Cities, only 170 miles from Chicago, have no passenger-rail connection to Chicago.
- Quincy, population 39,000, has two daily Amtrak frequencies to Chicago, 300 miles and five hours away, while Peoria, a wealthy industrial-commercial community of over 400,000 that is only 151 miles from Chicago — less than three hours from Chicago by modern trains — still lacks a passenger-rail connection.
Fortunately, both Peoria and the Quad Cities are located on the former Rock Island and would be within three hours of Chicago if the tracks were re-engineered for passenger trains. The quickest and cheapest way to bring Illinois’ Rock Island track up to modern passenger-train standards is for the state to buy it from its current owners, reengineer it for higher speeds and frequencies, and hire Metra to operate hourly frequencies to Peoria and the Quad Cities (with a stop at Utica for Starved Rock visitors).
The freight train operators will still be able to use the Rock by purchasing “trackage rights” from the state. Trackage rights are a venerable user fee that railroads pay when they have to venture onto another railroad to reach a customer. In fact, Iowa Interstate pays trackage rights fees to CSX in order to reach Joliet, and both carriers pay trackage rights fees to Metra to reach Chicago.
The huge success of the new Brightline passenger trains between Miami and Orlando suggests that with appropriate engineering improvements, Metra could be operating the same type of frequent and popular diesel-powered trains from Chicago to both the Quad Cities and Peoria. Both of the those two cities have vibrant, diverse economies based on manufacturing, digital technology, food processing, large regional medical centers and Inland Waterway transportation, and both have substantial populations of college students from Chicago. But airfares are discouragingly high, and highway congestion makes driving so unreliable that business travelers scheduled for a conference in Chicago usually drive here the day before and book a hotel room to make sure they’re on time for their morning meeting. A strong passenger train connection to Chicago would make thousands of lives easier (and safer).
Quick, frequent rail connections between a large city and its hinterland are a fundamental of modern economic geography. In Ireland, Dublin, population 1.35 million, has 14 daily round trips to Cork, population 200,000 and 135 miles away. Surely Chicago, with a metro population of 9 million, can support 14 daily frequencies to destinations of 400,000-plus less than 150 miles away — especially when trains to both destinations can use the same track for the first 114 miles.
Plus trains to the Quad Cities and Peoria can deliver something the Irish trains can’t: a stopover at Starved Rock.
Gov. JB Pritzker is a successful businessman. He needs to sit down with the CEOs of CSX and the Iowa Interstate and make a deal.
F.K. Plous is a Chicago transportation writer and a publicist for Corridor Rail Development Corp.
Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email letters@chicagotribune.com.
