WASHINGTON – Amtrak has urged federal regulators to reject Canadian National’s quest to obtain Kansas City Southern’s former Gateway Western trackage as a condition of the proposed Canadian Pacific-KCS merger.
CN aims to create a new single-line route dubbed the Springfield Speedway that would link Kansas City and St. Louis with Chicago, Detroit, and Eastern Canada via Springfield, Ill.
But Amtrak says that allowing CN to operate the lines would further hurt the already woeful on-time performance of its passenger trains operating on the former Illinois Central between Chicago and Gilman, Ill., as well as on the joint KCS-Union Pacific line between East St. Louis, Ill., and Godfrey, Ill.
In addition, Amtrak says CN would run more freight traffic – either additional or longer trains – over seven other line segments that currently host passenger service. These include a 250-mile portion of the former Illinois Central Chicago-New Orleans main line; three CN lines in Michigan; a short segment on CN in Memphis; as well as short sections of UP trackage in Kansas City and Springfield.
Amtrak’s July 12 filing with the Surface Transportation Board dredges up the long-running dispute over on-time performance of passenger trains on the former Illinois Central, even citing a 1991 Trains Magazine story that noted City of New Orleans on-time performance fell to 15% after IC single-tracked its main line in 1988 over Amtrak’s objections. [That article is included at bottom.]
Amtrak pointed out that CN told the STB in 2015 that the biggest issue affecting the performance of Chicago-Carbondale service was a lack of capacity on the IC main line. Amtrak operates six daily trains over the line, including the City of New Orleans and the Illini/Saluki service between Chicago and Carbondale. (One of the Carbondale roundtrips is currently suspended.) CN sends 20 or more freights over the route each day.
Now, Amtrak notes, CN says that the Chicago-Gilman portion of the route has excess capacity that will enable it to handle two additional CN trains per day without interfering with Amtrak service. CN acknowledged that it has not performed a capacity analysis to measure the impact of additional freight traffic on Amtrak trains.
The East St. Louis-Godfrey segment is jointly owned by UP and KCS. UP dispatches the line, which is part of Amtrak’s corridor linking Chicago and St. Louis. It hosts 10 Amtrak trains per day, including four Lincoln Service round-trips as well as the Texas Eagle. The trains, Amtrak says, routinely encounter freight train interference that would be exacerbated by the addition of 2.6 CN trains per day, on average.
CN’s responsive application regarding the KCS trackage doesn’t address how the additional trains would affect Amtrak service. But CN subsequently told Amtrak that the additional trains won’t affect passenger service, even though it did not perform a capacity analysis.
Amtrak contends that forcing Canadian Pacific Kansas City to divest the Gateway Western trackage to CN would not be in the public interest due to the impact additional freight traffic would have on passenger trains.
“Amtrak recognizes that many rail lines could accommodate the number of additional trains that CN is proposing to add on existing infrastructure. But the Chicago-Carbondale Line Segment, which has suffered from chronic freight train interference leading to poor Amtrak performance, is clearly not one of them. Nor is the East St. Louis-Godfrey Line Segment, on which Amtrak trains continue to experience unacceptably high levels of freight train interference today. Increased Amtrak delays on that line could nullify or substantially diminish the public benefits from the over $1.6 billion in public investment in the Chicago-St. Louis High Speed Rail Corridor of which it is part,” Amtrak told the board.
This 1991 Trains article was included with Amtrak’s filing as its Exhibit A:
