UP plays nicer in Illinois. I suspect it’s because Illinois doesn’t have Prop 13 and when UP asserts that it’s ROW is so very very valuable the tax assessor starts asking uncomfortable questions and giving uncomfortable answers. If they sell half their ROW, does that mean their tax liability is halved?

There will be property takes for the grade separations. There’s a grade crossing every mile or so, it is crossing the Northwest Territories grid after all, if someone doesn’t want highway grade separations intruding into his or her farmland they can just close the grade crossing…. and they can drive to the next crossing a mile or two away to get across the tracks. That’s going to be an incentive to not obstruct grade separations.

The former IC lines heading south from Chicago are owned by Metra. Fully grade separated all the way into Millenium Station. Metra also owns the Rock Island line. The Heritage Corridor, if Wikipedia is to be believed, is owned by CN north of Joliet.

http://fragis.frasafety.net/GISFRASafety/default.aspx

I may not be reading it correctly but it looks like BNSF is the railroad that goes to Union Station, UP goes to Ogilvie. Ogilvie isn’t a good choice for service to points south of Chicago.

In areas where the legacy line doesn’t hook up to the Amtrak station

I suspect that all of the Amtrak stations, ones that have actual trains, not Thruway buses, are on railroad lines. If they select a line that doesn’t have Amtrak service I suspect that the nearby Amtrak station will be moved to the higher speed line.

$400 million of Illinois funds? What Illinois funds? Our $13 billion deficit? The $700 million the state is in arrears to the universities alone? The more than $5 billion backlog of unpaid state bills? Or our $77 billion pension shortfall?

The fact is, while Illinois is increasingly amenable to the idea of rail, actually paying for it cannot be counted on in this current budget crisis. There are serious questions as to whether the state can even meet the governor’s highly road-skewed commitment to transportation bonding, as there isn’t enough tax revenue coming in to back the bonds and the state House leadership continues with its fantasy of getting bipartisan support for a tax increase at a time that the Republicans have gone full-on teabag. (Note that in Illinois, the sales tax increases and the creation of the income tax were all Republican decisions; at least in the last 50 years Democrats have never raised individual statewide taxes; and they’re exceedingly reluctant to do it without Republican votes).

Additionally, there hasn’t been any overall move in state transportation spending away from roads. The new bonding package, Illinois Jobs Now! has, if anything, a slightly smaller percentage share for rail/bus/transit than the last one a decade ago. The bonding package, a $31 billion, five-year plan of capital improvements for roads, rail, transit, schools, airports, economic development, community development, environmental reclamation and so on, is the first capital bill we’ve had in Illinois since George Ryan’s Illinois FIRST scheme from 1999-2004. (Blagojevich refused to agree to any major capital spending, in the pursuit of his no-new-taxes pledge.) We have $14.3 billion on roads; only $7 billion for all other transportation including transit, HSR, airports, CREATE, Amtrak and studies into car-sharing. So the important takeaway from this for HSR is that there is basically nil chance within the next five years of expanding that $400 million number even if by some miracle we’re able to balance the overall state budget.

Any other route into Chicago is going to require massive new construction and land acquisition and cost eye-poppipng amounts of money. The CNW/N or rather UP/N as it is now is fairly well grade separated but you’d minimally need to restore the third track and there’s no room for the four tracks you’d need to completely separate local and express services; Amtrak’s ambitions for dedicated passenger tracks as far as Porter, Indiana, at least have available right of way and are fairly easy to grade separate. And the current routes to St. Louis and Milwaukee are littered with grade crossings, congested with other traffic, are insufficiently wide and would need to be completely done over.

But even carving a new ROW is really cheap. In areas where the legacy line doesn’t hook up to the Amtrak station or has curves, there’s no reason to use it. This isn’t the SF Peninsula or New Jersey we’re talking about.

Grade crossings are expensive to maintain. The railroad will jump at the chance to get rid of the grade crossings and upgrade their track to 90 mile an hour freight.