Area residents want to stop new railroad line

Brad Jennings
Posted 3/24/17

More than 200 show up for Town Hall meeting about new Great Lakes Basin railroad plan.

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Area residents want to stop new railroad line

Posted

KINGS – Lana Daily told the crowd at Kings Grade School Thursday night that without working together, stopping a proposed rail line through the area would be very hard to do.
“Without all of us standing up together, it makes it more difficult to fight this,” Daily, of Winnebago County, told a crowd of more than 100 people gathered at an informational meeting about the proposed Great Lakes Transportation company’s plan.
The line would run from Wisconsin, through northern Illinois and into Indiana.
The revised route is now proposed to go through Kings.
Ogle County Board member Tom Smith hosted the event. He said Ogle County is organizing efforts against the proposed rail line a little later than those in Winnebago County.
“We’ve come late to the party, but we can still dance,” he said.

Speaker Brock McWilliams showed the route, which cuts through the farm fields and rural areas of Ogle County, and told the crowd that the rail line could have health and environmental impacts on the region. He said the cars in the proposed line would carry oil and chemicals.
He said if there is an accident and the chemicals catch on fire, “they are left to burn out.”
He said there will also be impacts to agriculture, hunting and fishing in the area and even make it more difficult for emergency vehicles to get to accident scenes due to the rail lines.
He also said that the company could use eminent domain to take the property of people on the proposed route.
“This is a private company,” he said. “They are going to make money from what they take from you and put it in their pocket.”
Speaker Lauren Hintzsche said that the route has changed once and now, “affects a whole new group of people.” She said it would probably change again.
All of the speakers encouraged residents to write letters to the Surface Transportation Board, which is looking at the environmental impacts of the proposed GLBT line.
“If you’ve written one letter, write another one,” Daily said.
GLBT has until May 1 to file its application for the rail line to provide another status report to the Surface Transportation Board.
No one from GLBT was at the meeting.