THEY CREATE AN UNPLEASANT DOWNTOWN AND NOW A FEW FREIGHT TRAINS WILL RUIN IT?

It was the height of urban planning expertise once upon a time to run expressways through central business districts, sometimes putting all those lanes between the high street and a river or lakefront.  In Dubuque, Iowa, that created an inorganic amenity.

The latest round of Rail Baron with full-sized trains appears to have produced one transaction, with Canadian Pacific acquiring Kansas City Southern.  The merged company will be called Canadian Pacific Kansas City.  I kind of like calling it Canadien Pacifique de Mexico, with the herald being a sombrero-wearing beaver, but I digress.

Because of the existing railroad map, the connection from Canadian Pacific's east-west transcontinental line to Kansas City Southern's north-south transcontinental line uses former Milwaukee Road trackage along the west bank of the Mississippi River to somewhere south of the Quad Cities, where it strikes out to the southwest, and nobody is seriously talking about putting back the Midland Continental, a railway mania project to run more or less directly from Winnipeg to Kansas City and Galveston that resulted only in a few miles of track in the neighborhood of Jamestown, North Dakota.

But I digress.  The point of the merger is to expedite the movement of goods throughout North America, and that means ... a few more freight trains a day through Dubuque.  To the ruination of their city.

The city’s letter says “Dubuque already has challenges with the current nine trains per day. The proposed merger will have real and tangible negative impacts on Dubuque and specifically on the mostly low-income residents to live adjacent to the tracks in the heart of our downtown and the businesses in the same general area.” These include increased problems with existing stormwater infrastructure, vibration damage to historic buildings, risk a derailment would pose to the city’s water plant, and air and noise pollution.

They also include traffic disruptions, an area in which the letter says CP and Canadian National, which shares some track with CP, “have a long and sordid history over many decades of blocking key east-west road crossings … There are regular occurences … when parked trains block road crossings for hours.”

Those are the remaining "historic buildings" after blocks of such buildings were cleared for the expressway, and all the noise and vibration the automobiles and semis bring.  Train frequencies, even with the merger, are still low compared to, say, the middle of the twentieth century.