You've probably sat in traffic on I-90, staring at the bumper of a semi-truck, wondering why on earth we don't have a train that just works. It's the Great American Pipe Dream. High speed rail Chicago has been a talking point for decades, whispered in the halls of Springfield and debated in the boardroom of Amtrak. We talk about it like it's some futuristic sci-fi concept, yet China is out here building thousands of miles of track while we argue over environmental impact studies for a single bridge. Honestly, it’s frustrating. Chicago is the undisputed rail hub of North America, the place where all the tracks meet, yet if you want to get to St. Louis or Detroit, you're mostly stuck with "higher-speed" rail—which is basically just a train that doesn't stop for every single cow in a cornfield.
We need to be real about what "high speed" actually means. In Europe or Japan, we're talking about 200 mph. In the Midwest? We get excited when the Lincoln Service hits 110 mph. That’s an improvement, sure, but it isn’t the bullet train we were promised in those glossy 2009 brochures.
The Messy Reality of the Midwest Hub
Chicago is a bottleneck. It's a beautiful, historic, logistical nightmare. If you look at a rail map, everything converges on the Loop. That sounds great until you realize that freight trains—the ones carrying coal, grain, and Amazon packages—own most of the dirt those tracks sit on. Companies like Union Pacific and BNSF aren't exactly incentivized to move their slow, heavy, profitable freight out of the way so a sleek passenger train can zoom past.
This is the "shared corridor" problem. It’s why your train to Carbondale is forty minutes late because a freight train had a mechanical issue three miles ahead. To get actual high speed rail Chicago enthusiasts dream of, we basically have to build entirely new, dedicated tracks. That costs billions. Not "budget surplus" billions, but "generational debt" billions.
Rick Harnish, the executive director of the High Speed Rail Alliance, has been beating this drum for years. He argues that we don't just need faster trains; we need a completely different network architecture. He’s right. You can’t just put a Ferrari engine in a 1994 Honda Civic and expect it to handle like a race car. The infrastructure—the signals, the curves, the grade crossings—has to be rebuilt from the ground up.
The 110 MPH Milestone (And Why It’s Not Enough)
Last year, the big news was the completion of the Chicago-to-St. Louis upgrades. They spent nearly $2 billion. Now, trains can hit 110 mph on long stretches of the journey. It shaved about thirty minutes off the trip.
Is it better? Yes.
Is it "high speed" by global standards? Not even close.
Real high-speed rail (HSR) requires the elimination of grade crossings. That means no cars crossing the tracks at the same level. Every intersection has to be a bridge or an underpass. Why? Because if a train hits a truck at 220 mph, the physics are catastrophic. On the St. Louis run, they kept most of the crossings but added fancy gate systems. It works, but it caps the speed. It’s a compromise. We are the kings of the Midwest compromise.
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Where Does the Money Actually Go?
Most people think the federal government just writes a check and the trains appear. I wish. The funding for high speed rail Chicago projects is a patchwork of state grants, federal infrastructure bills like the IIJA (Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act), and local matches.
The Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT) has to juggle these priorities with a thousand other things, like fixing the potholes on the Dan Ryan. Politics enters the chat, too. Downstate legislators often see rail spending as a "Chicago gift," while Chicagoans wonder why they’re subsidizing rural tracks they’ll never ride.
- The Chicago Hub Improvement Program (CHIP) is the latest big push.
- It’s a $1 billion-plus plan to fix Union Station’s basement—literally.
- The goal is to increase capacity so trains don't get stuck waiting for a platform.
Union Station is a "stub-end" station. Trains go in, then they have to back out. It’s incredibly inefficient. Imagine if every time you pulled into your garage, you had to call a dispatcher to make sure no one else was using the driveway before you could leave again. That’s what Amtrak deals with every single day in the West Loop.
The O'Hare Express: A Ghost Story
Remember the Elon Musk Boring Company plan? The idea was to drill tunnels from downtown to O'Hare and whisk people away in specialized Teslas. It was flashy. It made for great headlines. It also never happened.
The "O'Hare Express" has been a political football for three mayors. Currently, the Blue Line is your best bet, but it's a forty-five-minute slog if the signals are acting up. A true high-speed link to the airport would change the city's economy, but the "Blue Line vs. New Train" debate keeps everyone in a stalemate. We tend to let the "perfect" be the enemy of the "good enough."
Why the Midwest is Actually Perfect for Trains
People say, "America is too big for trains." That’s a lie. Maybe you don't want to take a train from Chicago to Los Angeles—that's what planes are for. But look at the "Midwest Megaregion."
Chicago, Milwaukee, Madison, Indianapolis, Detroit, St. Louis.
These cities are all within 100 to 400 miles of each other. That is the "sweet spot" for rail. If you can get from Union Station to downtown Detroit in two and a half hours, you’ll never go to O'Hare again. You skip the TSA, the two-hour early arrival, the cramped middle seat, and the $60 Uber. You just walk onto the train, open your laptop, and you're there.
The demand is there. Every time Amtrak adds a frequency or bumps the speed slightly, ridership numbers jump. People want this. They're tired of the "Stuck on I-94" lifestyle.
The Competition: Brightline and the Private Model
We have to look at Florida. Brightline is the only private high-speed rail operator in the U.S. right now. They aren't doing 200 mph yet, but they’re hitting 125 mph and, more importantly, they’re reliable. They built their own stations that look like Apple stores.
Could a private company do high speed rail Chicago to Indianapolis? Possibly. But the Midwest has a different geography than Florida. We have more freight interference and a more complex winter. Still, the success of Brightline has shifted the conversation from "Can we do this?" to "Why aren't we doing this?"
The Technical Hurdles Nobody Mentions
Building a train is easy. Building a straight line is hard.
- Curvature: To go 200 mph, you need very wide turns. Most existing tracks in Illinois were laid out in the 1800s. They follow old property lines and riverbeds. To straighten them out, you have to seize land through eminent domain. That is a legal and political nightmare that takes decades.
- Soil Composition: The Midwest is basically one giant, wet prairie. High-speed tracks need a "stiff" roadbed. If the ground shifts even a fraction of an inch, a high-speed train has to slow down for safety.
- Power: True HSR is electric. That means overhead wires (catenary). We don't have those in the Midwest. Our trains are diesel-electric. Transitioning to a fully electrified grid for high speed rail Chicago would require a massive investment in the power grid itself.
What's Next? Actionable Reality
If you're waiting for a 200 mph bullet train to take you to a Cardinals game next season, I’ve got bad news. It's not happening. But that doesn't mean nothing is happening. We are in a phase of "incrementalism."
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The next five years will see more 110 mph segments. We will see the "Borealis" train (Chicago to St. Paul) potentially get more frequencies because it’s been a massive hit since it launched. We will see Union Station undergo a massive renovation that makes the boarding process less like a cattle prod experience and more like a modern transit hub.
What you can actually do:
- Support the Chicago Hub Improvement Program: This is the unsexy, "behind the scenes" work on tracks and platforms that actually allows more trains to run. Without it, speed doesn't matter because the trains have nowhere to park.
- Ride the existing lines: The only way to prove demand to the federal government is through ticket sales. The Lincoln Service and the Hiawatha are the blueprints. Use them.
- Follow the FRA Corridor Identification Program: The Federal Railroad Administration is currently vetting several Midwest routes for massive future funding. Keep an eye on the Chicago-to-Columbus-to-Pittsburgh route; it’s one of the most promising candidates for a completely new line.
The dream of high speed rail Chicago isn't dead, but it has moved past the stage of "cool drawings" into the gritty, expensive stage of "fixing the plumbing." It's slow. It's frustrating. But for a city that was built on the back of the locomotive, it’s the only way forward. We just have to decide if we're willing to pay for the "dedicated" tracks that finally let us leave the freight trains—and the traffic jams—in the rearview mirror.