WORKING TO CROSS PURPOSES? Genoa's chamber of commerce hosted an open forum Wednesday night at Kishwaukee College to offer local government officials an opportunity to present their positions and take questions from citizens about the possible resumption of Amtrak service to the North West Frontier. Passenger Train Journal editor Mike Schafer and I attended, and this post might be a first draft of a joint essay on the meeting and the continuing wrangle over routing, although any published essay will present material without the Cold Spring Shops insider talk. The DeKalb Daily Chronicle has a brief summary of the meeting, and the Northern Star report refers cryptically to what presenters call Route C (to ferroequinologists, the Illinois Central's Land O'Corn line but entering the south throat of Chicago Union Station rather than proceeding to the lakefront) as the heart of the controversy.

The forum was moderated by my colleague John Lewis of the Center for Governmental Studies. Because the Genoa Chamber is the organizer, a number of participants put in Genoa's case. Briefly, a 2006 cost study for Amtrak by the Illinois Department of Transportation identified the Illinois Central routing as least costly to construct and to operate, but Illinois governor Pat Quinn authorized development of a routing via Belvidere using tracks of several railroads as a state-funded project after the Illinois Central routing failed to qualify for federal funding in the same competition that might bring Talgo trains to Madison. DeKalb residents take an interest in this routing as some train advocates hope the Amtrak service will benefit Northern Illinois University students, a point not lost on Genoa city manager Joe Misurelli. Mr Misurelli was at the forum, with slides of his Thunen rings showing the ridership potential along the Illinois Central, including most of the residents of Belvidere with little change in drive time to the stations. The mayor of Genoa, Todd Walker, also spoke briefly in favor of the Illinois Central line, wondering why there is controversy over what the 2006 study identified as the least costly option, and Belvidere mayor Fred Brereton attended, more to express his fear that there would be no train service to northwestern Illinois than to make the case for the routing through his city.

State Representative Bob Pritchard, who took no position on the choice of route, also noted that reaching agreement on a route (perhaps with a final determination from the Illinois Department of Transportation) is more important than which cities east of Rockford are on the train line. State Senator Bradley Burzynski, a supporter of the Belvidere route, concurred on that point, but reiterated his support for that route as the first step toward extending Metra commuter trains to Belvidere and ultimately Rockford.

Several times during the meeting, speakers attempted to draw a distinction between an intercity train (Amtrak) and a commuter train (Metra). The expectations advocates of both routes offered, however, blur the distinction. A train that brings Belvidere residents to the Fox Valley or Bensenville for O'Hare and Schaumburg in time for work and brings them home after work is a commuter train, no matter who operates it, no matter how many tourists are going antiquing in Galena, no matter how many Huskies are headed to Freeport or Lena, no matter that Carson's and Marshall Field open just after the train arrives.

For students at Northern Illinois, the shuttle to Elburn is the preferable option for anybody headed to Chicago or riding Amtrak anywhere but northwest of Rockford (a speaker mentioned a student headed to Pittsburgh, that's pretty rare) until Metra gets to DeKalb and it's probably no longer a ride than a shuttle to Genoa (getting around Sycamore is more like getting around Naperville despite the recession). For the corridor to work, a schedule with a morning and an evening train in each direction has much more promise than a reprise of the morning-up, evening-down Black Hawk that expired in 1981. The commuter train advocates will have a stronger case if Amtrak schedules permit easy transfer to Metra, and they'd have a stronger case still if Amtrak and Metra could get their act together on interline ticketing, something I discovered a year ago Labor Day is still the case in England.