By Gitte Laasby, Post-Tribune
glaasby@post-trib.com
GARY -- Northwest Indiana's hopes of obtaining $2.8 billion in federal funding for a Chicago-Cleveland railroad corridor have not been derailed.
The state's top transportation official vowed Friday he'd work to improve a bid for the project, but said it might have to built in increments rather than one big chunk.
"We're disappointed we did not get selected for the Chicago-Cleveland corridor, but we have not given up on that," said Indiana Department of Transportation Commissioner Michael Reed. "The future step is to find out why we didn't rise to the top."
Along with a couple of hundred regional leaders and officials, Reed attended a speech Friday by Federal Railroad Administrator Joseph Szabo in Gary. The meeting celebrated a $71.4 million stimulus grant that will remedy a "choke point in traffic" -- a railroad bottleneck from Porter to the state line.
"My team and (Szabo's) team will sit down and go through the application and the plusses and minuses. Here's what we can do better," Reed told the Post-Tribune after the speech. "We can start building sections. Maybe that's the way to go. I think we'll learn more as we go through the next couple of months."
Reed said one solution is to get officials on various stretches of the Chicago-Cleveland corridor to convene to find out what can be done in the short-, mid- and long term.
Szabo said states like California and Ohio, which received much larger amounts of funding, had prepared their projects for a decade.
"By nature, these applications rise to the top," he said. "Other departments of transportation should use this to stay in the game and keep preparing themselves for the future. That'd allow their applications to have the quality that rises to the top."
Szabo said federal officials evaluated proposals based on several conditions, including whether projects are ready to advance, what the return on investment and public benefit would be, and how they create a foundation for a future network.
Szabo called the $71.4 million Indiana Gateway "a sweet spot of investment." It will create 703 jobs per year over two years and reduce delays for the 87 freight trains and 14 Amtrak trains that traverse the corridor daily. Improvements include relocation, reconfiguration and addition of high-speed crossovers and an improved signal system.
Kevin Brubaker, deputy director with the Environmental Law & Policy Center in Chicago, said the project would have environmental benefits, too.
"Passenger trains are three times as effective as cars and six times as effective as planes. By providing more mobility, we can strengthen our environment and our economy," he said. "The freight is coming from China through the west coast. It's coming through Indiana regardless. The question is whether you'd rather have the traffic on highways or on the rails where there's less air pollution as a result."
Szabo said one freight train can carry what corresponds to 280 diesel trucks' worth of goods.