Village Fights for Grade Separation Funding

The is fighting to get Canadian National Railway (CN) to fund a hefty portion of construction costs to develop a grade separation at Route 14.

The village filed a petition asking CN to pay for for 84 percent of the costs involved for the project on Oct. 14 before the Surface Transportation Board (STB). The request was made based on a traffic study conducted showing the delays that will be caused when CN’s freight traffic is at full capacity, which is expected to happen in 2015.

The study compares the traffic delays between what is estimated at Route 14 in Barrington, and Route 34 in Aurora where CN was already ordered to pay a large portion of that city’s grade separation project.

Engineering consultants discovered that the village is estimated to have 116 to 122 hours of traffic delay due to freight trains at the Route 14 crossing in Barrington. Aurora’s traffic delays measured 114 hours. 

“In actuality, Barrington will have a more severe impact when we’re up to the 2015 20 trains a day,” Village President Karen Darch said.

There are currently no grade-separated roadways from the railroad tracks within the village limits. The four at-grade crossings (Lake Zurich Road, Route 14, Route 59/Hough Street, and Lake Cook Road) all cross the tracks within 6,000 feet of each other. If a long train passes through, traffic can be stopped at every intersection along the railway.

“CN’s trains are sometimes 3,000 feet but they can be as many as 10,000 feet…and actually they can be 12,000 feet, but we haven’t seen too many of those,” Darch said.

Another major point the village addresses in its petition to the STB is the fact that the Department of Transportation already for initial funding on the grade separation project. That money is currently being used for preliminary engineering.

“We are hopeful that the STB will seriously consider this and we will in the end prevail with additional mitigation,” Darch said. 

Visit the village's website to read the entire petition to the STB.