Minooka pushes back on massive rail project it says will flood village with truck traffic

For the past year, the village of Minooka has pressed Canadian National Railway for one big change to the 900-acre intermodal and warehouse complex it’s planning on the edge of town.

Instead of sending 900,000 diesel trucks a year north through Minooka’s main commercial district to access Interstate 80, the village wants the railroad to send them to a freeway entrance 5½ miles to the southwest.

The state of Illinois built an I-80 entrance ramp there in 2012 in part to keep heavy trucks away from Minooka’s commercial and residential areas.

So far, CN hasn’t veered from its plan to use Minooka’s roads and its commercial district of banks and strip malls for trucks, even in the face of stiff opposition from the village.

“This will make us like Chicago, and maybe worse than your busiest roadways in Chicago,” Ric Offerman, Minooka’s mayor, said in an interview with the Chicago Tribune.

“It feels like we’re getting this thing stuffed down our throats,” he said. “It’s the big guy with the money telling the little guy to get out of the way.”

Minooka is a village of 13,000 people 40 miles southwest of Chicago. However, the issues raised in its battle with CN will reverberate across Illinois as the state tries to nearly double its total freight tonnage by 2050.

On Friday, Minooka fought back, asking the U.S. District Court in northern Illinois for a binding order allowing the village to impose weight limits on its roads, and as a result, to force CN’s trucks onto U.S. Route 6 instead.

Under Illinois law, the village said in its court filing, “Minooka is authorized to exercise its police powers with respect to streets and highways under its jurisdiction, including adopting and enforcing weight limit traffic regulations.”

In effect, the village is trying to make permanent a temporary 25-ton limit imposed in March to exclude most loaded 18-wheelers from McLindon Road north of the CN intermodal.

Jonathan Abecassis, a CN spokesman, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about the lawsuit filed Friday by Minooka.

In a statement Thursday, he said the railroad has responded to Minooka’s complaints by planning to send more of its trucks to U.S. Route 6 than originally planned. But the railroad was still planning to use the village’s commercial strip for trucks, the statement said.

“CN continues to work collaboratively with community partners in Minooka and Channahon to review their concerns about community impacts,” he said. “We strive to be a good neighbor and we are listening.”

Forcing the trucks onto U.S. Route 6 to enter I-80 at Brisbin Road would “hinder the efficiency and effectiveness of CN’s intermodal operations,” according to a statement last year by V3 Cos., a consultant hired by the railroad.

CN said in an April 26 letter to Minooka that with certain modifications, the city’s roads can readily handle the increased traffic.

In any case, CN’s Darren Reynolds said in the letter that federal law prohibits Minooka and the state of Illinois from using any local permitting or approval processes to try to block the project.

Indeed, federal law “categorically prevents states and localities from imposing requirements that … could be used to deny a rail carrier’s ability to conduct rail operations,” according to the U.S. Surface Transportation Board.

These could include local zoning requirements or environmental or land use permits, the transportation board said.

The CN yard would be located south of Minooka, mostly in the neighboring village of Channahon.

But under current plans, about a quarter of its trucks would exit north onto McLindon Road and then make their way to Ridge Road, Minooka’s main commercial thoroughfare, to reach the closest interchange onto I-80.

The slow-moving trucks would snarl traffic through the interchange, which already sees half of all traffic accidents in the 9.5-square-mile village, and further endanger the public, Offerman said.

“That retail strip will end up dying out, because a lot less people are going to want to battle traffic to go down there,” said John Underhill, manager of the Minooka Lumber & Supply Co., which is located about half a mile away from Minooka’s I-80 interchange.

“I don’t think anyone around here is actually for this thing,” Underhill said, referring to the CN yard. “But we’re also not naive enough to think anybody can stop it.”

As CN plans a community and media open house in a few weeks, the mayor has been telegraphing for weeks that Minooka could take its CN battle to court.

“They very politely tell you they want to work with you but that if you don’t like it, they’re going to do it anyway because here’s a law from the 1800s that says the railroads can do what they want,” Offerman said during his “State of the Village” speech in April.

A part-time mayor, Offerman, 79, is a retired history teacher from Channahon Junior High School. His father also served as Minooka’s mayor.

In a May 15 letter, Minooka Village Administrator Daniel Duffy told CN that “local municipalities can exercise traditional police powers to protect public health and safety, even over the development of railroad property.”

A U.S. district court in 2005 affirmed that cities can police railroads in limited ways to protect public safety, even as it blocked Vermont’s effort to impose environmental restrictions on Green Mountain Railroad Corp.

Railroads view intermodal switching yards as central to their future growth plans. But because they’re so big and put so many diesel trucks on the road, the yards frequently spawn lawsuits.

In the Toronto suburb of Milton, CN had to halt work for two months on a $182 million intermodal yard because of a lawsuit claiming the Canadian government failed to consider the harmful impacts of diesel fumes from trucks and trains in its original approval. Work resumed in May as the lawsuit continues.

In the Dallas suburb of Gunther, BNSF Railway is suing city officials, accusing them of trying to block a 900-acre intermodal and warehouse complex.

According to a July 2023 report by V3, the CN consultant, the railroad plans to open the Minooka complex in 2026 with the capacity for 200,000 annual “lifts,” or container movements on or off a rolling chassis or trailer.

According to the V3 report that Minooka officials provided to the Chicago Tribune, the annual “lift” number will grow to 1 million by 2036, along with 8 million square feet of warehouses on the site.

By the end of this build-out, CN’s new Minooka rail yard would rival in size the intermodal yards that BNSF Railway and the Union Pacific Railroad operate in nearby Elwood and Joliet.

BNSF is also planning an additional intermodal yard in the adjoining town of Wilmington.

According to a V3 assessment last year, CN’s planned intermodal operations and warehouses would require 9,691 heavy truck trips a day or 3.5 million a year at full build-out.

V3 estimates that about a quarter of these would access I-80 through the village’s main commercial area, but there’s no legal or physical barrier to prevent this percentage from going higher.

Warehouses on the CN site would also require 8,726 passenger vehicle trips a day or 3.2 million a year, most of which would travel through Minooka’s commercial strip to I-80.

In addition, four trains a day would enter and then leave the yard through the north end of Minooka, Offerman said.

These trains would be 2 miles in length, Offerman said, citing verbal statements by CN officials.

Assuming they don’t stop, they could each take 20 minutes to pass through intersections north of the village, forcing residents to wait or find alternate routes.

To add insult to injury from Minooka’s point of view, most of the project’s taxable property would be located in Channahon.

This includes most of the warehouses that will need village-level permits — giving Channahon significantly greater potential leverage over CN than Minooka.

The towns share school and fire districts.

But if Minooka needed more infrastructure spending to cope with the flood of trucks, its taxpayers could have to foot the bill unless the village can beat out hundreds of other towns in competition for state and federal road-building grants.

CN may also make infrastructure investments to help Minooka and surrounding towns cope with the traffic, Abecassis said.

According to Trains magazine, Chicago is the heart of CN’s Y-shaped network, which links southern Mexico with Pacific ports like Vancouver, British Columbia, and Atlantic ports like Montreal.

Montreal-based CN greatly enhanced its ability to move freight through the Chicago region, without needing to exchange it with other railroads, by purchasing the Elgin, Joliet & Eastern railroad from U.S. Steel in 2009, the magazine said.

The EJ&E tracks still form a big semicircle about 40 miles around Chicago, from Porter, Indiana, to Waukegan.

The tracks to Minooka connect up with this semicircle in Plainfield.

CN’s Reynolds said in his April 26 letter that the Minooka intermodal yard and warehouses would create 600 construction jobs and 5,000 permanent jobs on site and in surrounding towns upon full build-out.

Reynolds’s letter said the project “supports North American supply chains and addresses the growing demand for consumer goods as well as the need for efficient international export gateways through the greater Chicago area and the Midwest.”

The Minooka project would also help the environment by allowing more freight to move on trains rather than long-haul trucks, Reynolds said.

Trains do burn less fuel per ton of cargo than trucks while moving across open country. But they have to stop somewhere, and in Chicago, they’re usually unloaded with swarms of the fleet’s oldest and dirtiest diesel-fueled trucks.

“I’ve lived here 79 years, and 75% of our weather comes from westerly winds,” Offerman said.

“The pollution from this thing is going to hit the bottom of Minooka,” he said. “But I worry that it will then go all over Channahon and cross the river to hit Elwood.”

With a BNSF intermodal yard and an ExxonMobil tar sands refinery on its outskirts, Elwood was one of the most polluted U.S. cities for PM2.5 particulates last year, according to a global study by Goldach, Switzerland-based IQAIR.

According to Tom Durkin, Channahon’s village manager, the CN project is so big that it has already prompted Minooka and three adjoining towns — Channahon, Morris and Shorewood — to engage in collaborative infrastructure planning for all the nonresidential developments they see coming and that the CN project will turbocharge.

The four towns have 8,000 acres or more of vacant land zoned for nonresidential developments, Durkin said. That’s enough room for 150 additional warehouses and manufacturing buildings or more.

As Chicago’s next great warehouse boom takes shape in these towns, Channahon has been able to cut its property taxes in each of the last seven years, Durkin said.

At the same time, he said, the four towns are studying what they view as mistakes made in Joliet after BNSF opened Chicago’s first big intermodal complex in 2002.

These mistakes, he said, included waiting too long to build the necessary freeway interchanges, allowing trucks to intermingle too freely with passenger cars in and around residential neighborhoods, and dispersing warehouses too widely across the whole city.

Durkin said he’s not blaming particular individuals. At the time, he said, nobody realized how quickly globalization and e-commerce would take hold and supersize the warehouses and the intermodal terminals.

For now, the towns plus an array of state and county officials have been focused on applying for a $400,000 planning and research grant from the Illinois Department of Transportation.

Durkin said the towns hope to hear back about this application to IDOT in the next few months.

He said they’re also considering whether to chip in on preliminary engineering designs for widening U.S. Route 6 to four lanes through Channahon and Minooka to support the coming warehouse boom.

The towns would use this preliminary work to support their application to Springfield and Washington for as much as $100 million that could be needed for the project, he said. CN could also be asked to contribute.

But these regional planning efforts don’t automatically translate into support for Minooka’s battle with CN.

In 2002, Minooka and Channahon signed a boundary agreement in which they promised not to compete for development projects beyond their city limits.

This agreement gave Channahon control of most of what became the CN site. It means that today, the two towns don’t “meddle” in talks they’re each having with property developers like CN, said Michael Petrick, Channahon’s director of community development.

“We’re not going to get involved with what’s happening on their side of the line,” Petrick said.

Even though their jagged border stretches for 6 miles, Channahon and Minooka have always followed divergent paths for economic development.

Minooka prospered starting in 1852 because it had a stop on the famous Rock Island railroad line to the Mississippi River.

In contrast, Channahon’s development stalled after the Civil War as railroads quickly overshadowed the Illinois & Michigan Canal on which the town had pinned its hopes.

The 900 acres on which CN is planning its intermodal and warehouse complex now consists of gently rolling woodlands and corn and soybean fields.

Durkin said the properties had been zoned for intensive industrial uses, including intermodal terminals and warehouses, for decades before the railroad bought them from a group of wealthy local investors about five years ago.

For years, he said, Channahon expected the land to be used for tank farms and other support facilities for LyondellBasell and other petrochemical companies operating nearby.

Instead of tank farms, Channahon will wind up with 2-mile-long trains, vast warehouses and swarms of diesel trucks.

Offerman insists that Minooka is not trying to stop the CN project and has repeatedly offered to allow passenger cars and emergency vehicles from the site to pass through its main commercial strip.

He also says Minooka has vacant land which it’s trying to fill with warehouses and wants to ensure it has the infrastructure they need to operate safely.

In April, Walmart opened a consolidation center with 700 workers in Minooka.

“We’ve made an attempt to plan for our district and take care of how many warehouses we’re going to have and how many trucks will be coming,” Offerman said.

“These additional CN trucks are not something we ever planned on, and we don’t have the infrastructure to handle them,” he said.

Robert Bols, 77, grows corn and soybeans on 300 acres that he rents and owns along U.S. Route 6. These include land his grandfather started renting in 1917. The 13 acres he owns outright lie directly alongside CN property.

His farm also lies just across the highway from an Aux Sable Liquid Products natural gas refinery. When the flaring of excess gas gets intense enough during the winter, he said, he can feel the heat on his face from hundreds of yards away.

Bols said he, his father and his son have all been hit by fast-moving cars as they hauled farm equipment along U.S. Route 6. He said the additional trucks coming from CN will bring “a traffic nightmare” that could force him off his farm.

“These truck drivers aren’t going to want to slow down to 12 miles an hour until I get off the road,” Bols said.

“Why do we need all these warehouses?” he asked. “This is good farm soil. It’s not the best, but it’s good, and it grows food.

“Once you plow something like this under, it’s gone forever.”

Underhill, the lumberyard manager, grew up on Sand Ridge Road in the adjoining town of Morris. His grandfather purchased 80 acres to grow corn, soybean and oats a century ago.

Now only 1 acre is left, with CN owning the rest. A grassy knoll marks the spot where his grandfather’s house stood until it got hit by a tornado.

Underhill’s brother Don, who’s 60, and his mother, Phyllis, who’s 90, still live in a small white ranch house on the family’s remaining acre of land.

Instead of looking out their back window at acres of growing corn, they’ll soon be watching as seemingly endless trains turn in a giant circle a few hundred feet away and then head back to rejoin the main CN network in Plainfield.

To the south of the tracks will be a fortresslike array of warehouses, and parades of diesel-powered trucks circulating among them.

“I’m sure this will change a lot of things, including the peace and quiet out here,” Don Underhill said, as he sprinkled water on his flowers in sweltering heat.

“Whether we have a say in this or not, it’s going to happen,” he said. “A big company like CN has plenty of money, and they’re going to do what they’re going to do.”