QC leaders laud LaHood’s call to go all-in on passenger rail

Regional leaders who have been part of the more than 16-year fight to win passenger rail service to the Quad Cities are applauding the call to action issued recently by former U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. The former Peoria, Illinois, congressman and state lawmaker from East Moline made the need to mount an all-in Interstate […]

Regional leaders who have been part of the more than 16-year fight to win passenger rail service to the Quad Cities are applauding the call to action issued recently by former U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. The former Peoria, Illinois, congressman and state lawmaker from East Moline made the need to mount an all-in Interstate 74 Bridge-like fight for passenger rail to Moline and beyond the centerpiece of his keynote address at the QCBJ’s inaugural Transportation and Infrastructure Seminar. As President Barack Obama’s first transportation secretary, Mr. LaHood’s efforts to highlight the terrible condition of the Quad Cities’ old twin-span green bridge set the wheels in motion that resulted in construction of the new award-winning, $1 billion I-74 Bridge. “The bridge would not be standing today without all of you that worked on it. It simply would not. When a community gets together and gets up every day and tries to figure out how to fix something, it eventually gets fixed,” Mr. LaHood told the crowd of about 220 transportation, business and community leaders at the Thursday, April 11, event, hosted by the QCBJ. “Now what you all need to do is the same thing you did for the bridge,” he added. “You need to get a core group of people who wake up every day and figure out how you persuade a freight rail in Iowa and the elected leadership in Iowa to take that rail line from here to Iowa City and Omaha.”  Former Illinois 17th Congressional District Rep. Cheri Bustos is among those who are lauding the challenge Mr. LaHood delivered during the transportation seminar at Bally’s Quad Cities Casino & Hotel in Rock Island. “Our efforts to land a Chicago to QC passenger rail route have had more stops and starts than a busy railroad crossing holding up traffic. But we persevere,” the five-term congresswoman told the QCBJ via email.   Ms. Bustos along with U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin frequently fought for federal funding for the project. “I served on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee while I served in Congress,” said Ms. Bustos, who these days co-chairs and runs the Illinois office of Mercury, a global bipartisan strategy firm. “While we kept the funding alive, we had a fight on our hands every day,” she added. “I like my friend Ray LaHood‘s prompt to our community to keep the effort going. It’s too important of a project to not move it forward and see it through completion.“

Rail plan picks up steam

The passenger rail effort was launched in 2008. In 2010, Mr. Durbin secured $177 million in federal funding for the project. Later, Mr. Durbin along with Ms. Bustos and U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois secured repeated funding extensions.  The current extension will expire this year unless the Illinois Department of Transportation and the Iowa Interstate Railroad (IAIS) reach an agreement for track upgrades, Mr. Durbin’s office said. Only then can construction begin on a proposed route that originally was slated to begin service in 2014. “I’m pleased to see former Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood call for renewed efforts to push ahead with the Quad Cities Passenger Rail Project after years of unnecessary delays,” Mr. Durbin said in an email exchange with the QCBJ.   “Rail corridors are essential to our state,” he added. “I believe that the Quad Cities Passenger Rail Project will put us on a path toward a better-connected Illinois, fostering economic growth while enhancing accessibility. I, again, urge IDOT and IAIS to come to an agreement so that residents of the Quad Cities can finally see passenger service to Chicago come to fruition.” Moline City Administrator Bob Vitas is championing an overall passenger rail feeder route that would stretch from Chicago to the Quad Cities, Iowa and Nebraska as both a QC government leader and a member of the Illinois High-Speed Railway Commission. That commission’s mission is two-fold, he said: To build true high-speed rail between Chicago and St. Louis, and to upgrade interconnecting rail lines to support Amtrak-level service to new Chicago feeder routes including the Quad Cities. It has 12 months to draft a plan to do both, Mr. Vitas told the QCBJ during a post-seminar followup interview. Meanwhile, negotiations on the QC passenger rail route are complex and ongoing. “There’s a lot of players involved at the federal, state, local and quasi-local level. And then the private sector of course, they play a big part in it; it’s their railroad,” Mr. Vitas said of freight operator Iowa Interstate Railroad. Locally, passenger rail between Moline and Chicago “is something that has been sought after for a very, very long time,” Mr. Vitas acknowledged. In fact, he said, he suspects Quad Citians have dreamt of its return since Dec. 31, 1978, when the Quad Cities Rocket, the last passenger train to Chicago, left the depot here. “Transportation is critical,” Mr. Vitas said, and in the Quad Cities “we have all of the different elements, as Secretary LaHood said, we’ve got all the elements here except one, and it’s passenger rail.”  Critical to making that happen, Mr. LaHood told the seminar crowd, is to duplicate the unwavering community support for the bridge project’s success with the current campaign to win passenger rail. That includes creating a dedicated core of QC leaders concentrating on how to complete a project Mr. LaHood has been part of for 16 years.

LaHood on board from start

As President Obama’s transportation secretary, Mr. LaHood worked with then-Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn and others to launch the effort to create the passenger rail corridor from Chicago to the Quad Cities.  “You provided money, impetus, encouragement,” he told Quad Cities leaders gathered for the first Transportation & Infrastructure Seminar. Now, he added, IAIS continues to block the way because it won’t approve the passenger rail track upgrades needed at a Bureau County, Illinois, interchange that the freight carrier controls. “To me, the only thing standing in the way of making that happen is a freight rail system in Iowa and the Iowa political leadership saying, ‘This is important for infrastructure for the region, for the country,’” Mr. LaHood told the Quad Cities audience. Starting now, he said, regional leaders’ first priority must be to convince influential Iowa leaders to show the Iowa Interstate Railroad (whose tagline is “Connecting Iowa and Illinois to the world”) that it would be in the IAIS’ best interests to improve the tracks at Wyanet, Illinois. Mr. LaHood said he and Mr. Quinn confronted a similar problem when they wanted to grow the passenger rail line from Chicago to St. Louis on track controlled by Union Pacific.  After four years of successfully negotiating with the railroad for shared use, he said, “We put millions of dollars into that rail line and now the trains go faster there and that rail line is an economic engine for the whole region – from Chicago to Joliet to Bloomington-Normal.” He added, “If you build passenger rail from Chicago to the Quad Cities you will increase your opportunities for economic development for people coming here, but the Iowa piece has to get done, and you are the only ones that can make it happen.” Mr. Vitas said Quad Cities leaders also should extend their Chicago feeder extension lobbying efforts to leaders beyond Iowa’s borders. “I agree with Ray but I want to include Nebraska into that equation,” Mr. Vitas told the QCBJ. That way leaders in Illinois and Nebraska could work together to convince Iowa leaders in the middle to get aboard the passenger rail extension.  In the meantime, Mr. Vitas said the commission he serves on will continue its discussion with Iowa Interstate Railroad, the Illinois DOT, the governor’s office and Amtrak “to see whether or not we can make something happen.” Like Mr. LaHood, Mr. Vitas is confident that Quad Cities leaders can get the job done. “I honestly believe it will happen. I think there’s a push to have it happen. I think there’s a vested interest on the part of the players to have it happen,” Mr. Vitas said.