Chicago Region Environmental and Transportation Efficiency Program

It began as a task force convened by the federal Surface Transportation Board in the early 2000s in recognition of the growing urgency of the Chicago region's rail capacity needs.

[3] The Chicago region's rail infrastructure was largely configured to serve transportation needs and demands at the time it was originally built more than a century ago.

By the 1990s, many decades of modernization and consolidation within the freight and passenger railroad industries had drastically changed the operational demands being placed on this network.

Train lengths, routing patterns, capacity needs, rail-highway grade crossing conflicts and control technologies had all evolved over the years, but the region's rail infrastructure had not been sufficiently modernized to accommodate the new demands.

Oftentimes, shared control of rail facilities within the Chicago region had created institutional challenges to implementing needed modernization.

Under direction from the Surface Transportation Board and various elected officials and following several years of cooperative study and analysis by public agencies and private railroads, the CREATE Program was initiated in 2003 to identify, prioritize and address these infrastructure modernization needs.

[8] The project is located in the Chicago neighborhoods of Ashburn, Englewood, Auburn Gresham and West Chatham along two passenger and four freight rail lines.

It will eliminate the most congested rail chokepoint in the Chicago region, Belt Junction, where 30 Metra and 90 freight trains per day cross each other's paths.