Inside Amtrak’s $821M Chicago rail yard project: Who’s behind it, and who’s paying?

CHICAGO - The fight between South Side residents and Amtrak to keep the proposed Midwest maintenance facility out of Bridgeport took another step. The Federal Railroad Administration released its environmental assessment, finding the impact insignificant to the thousands of residents living around the proposed site. Residents have a month to weigh in.

Since August, when residents and lawmakers say they learned of the 24/7 rail yard, they've all had one question: How could a project get this far and move this fast?

In this Unit 32 investigation, FOX Chicago’s Brittany Toolis follows the money.

Amtrak Bridgeport yard proposal

The backstory:

Bridgeport – home of Chicago's White Sox for over a century. In those decades, Sox Park has been leveled and rebuilt, but the zip code remains.

"What's remarkable about the relationship between the White Sox and Bridgeport is it's the oldest relationship between a neighborhood and a major league baseball club that exists," said Paul Durica, director of curation and exhibitions at Chicago History Museum.

For just as long, Chicago's been a hub for rail – the country's main interchange point between the eastern and western railroads. From passengers heading to the coasts to Chicago becoming Hog Butcher of the World, rail has helped build the City of Big Shoulders. Amtrak has called the 14th Street Yard home since the late 70s, but the company, in an effort to expand and modernize, is looking to move, eyeing to build a new 24/7 maintenance facility in the Union Pacific Canal Street Yard – a move residents say feels full steam ahead since they learned about it in August.

"Yeah, the first day, well, so the first time I found out was a few days before the community meeting on August 20th. So a few days before that, there was just a flyer posted, like come learn about these improvements to the Midwest maintenance facility. No information. So I started looking it up and I was like flabbergasted. I could not believe that anybody would talk about moving what exists currently at 14th Street to the middle of a residential area," said Maria Lagiglio, a Bridgeport resident.

"Pretty peed off. I mean, really, we've been living here my whole life. I grew up five blocks from here. Now they're gonna put a four-story building right there. You're already a story and a half up, so that's five and a half stories. How would you like to come out and look at that and then trains running 24 hours a day? I mean it's, and what about the pollution? Where they gonna store the diesel fuel that they're going to use to rep... They ain't telling us that yet. And then they're going to put a washing station down on 29th to wash the trains. I mean, you would think that? Does that belong in a residential area?" said Phil Basso, a Bridgeport resident.

This proposed maintenance facility and rail yard fits into two trapezoids running along Canal from just north of Cermak to 38th Street, covering just under 60 acres. The footprint includes a maintenance and inspection building up to 75 feet high that's five tracks wide, with 24-hour work, though Amtrak says overnight work will be with limited crews. It also includes an underground diesel tank, salt storage and a separate commissary building off-site with up to 50 delivery trips a day.  Initially, the project received NEPA categorical exclusion, but after local pushback, the Federal Railroad Administration agreed to an environmental assessment.

The FRA published the EA on Nov. 6, which was 11 days after it was announced, finding the project to have "insignificant impact" on residents in the area but acknowledged there will be vibrations and noise from operations along with hazardous materials in soil and groundwater that will be disturbed during construction.

What they're saying:

The project bleeds into Bridgeport, Chinatown, Wentworth Gardens, and Armour Square, and Sox Park is right next to the south lot.

"They continue to use this term, ‘insignificant.’ It really rubs me the wrong way because the lives of the 6,741 residents that live within 500 feet of this rail yard on this proposed site are not insignificant," said 11th Ward Ald. Nicole Lee.

Lee and 11th District Cook County Commissioner John Daley both said in September that the location, scope and speed of this project caught them off guard.

"Throughout the country on Amtrak, they are not in residential communities. They're all in industrial, whether it be Boston, whether it be a Philly, whether it be Seattle, as well. It is wrong to put it in a residential community," Daley said.

"And the biggest question going on just amongst the people in the neighborhoods is when did you find out about the Amtrak rail yard?" asked FOX Chicago reporter Brittany Toolis.

"So the first time that we, Commissioner Daly and I heard about the Union Pacific Canal Yard in this conversation was November of 2025. Amtrak came in to give us an update on the Chicago Hub Improvement Program. One slide out of a 25-page deck was provided and at that point, it said they were looking at the canal yard for storage, for storage of train cars," Lee said.

Timeline:

On Amtrak's Midwest Maintenance Facility page, they have a pretty detailed one highlighting when they started showing interest in the Canal Street Yard, and I looked through them.

In 2023, no mention of buying UP's yard on the projects to consider for federal grants. In September 2024, we found this mention in an 18-minute presentation.

"I've got two minutes left so I have to speed this up. Yard storage and expansion assessment potential acquisition of the Canal Street Yard. Here in the image you see the yard on your left, you see on the right the White Sox stadium. We need more yard space to maintain the additional fleet required to expand services to and from Chicago and so we're in preliminary discussion with UP about the purchase of a yard," a speaker said.

A June 2025 presentation got a little more specific, with one slide mentioning building a covered facility at the Canal Street Yard but also said Amtrak is still determining a layout for maintenance and storage facilities in Chicago, with the final step "begin use as storage yard 2026-27."

And in fall 2025, according to Amtrak's timeline, private developer Canal Edge came on board, with owner Justin Ishbia pledging $125 million of his own money – that amount though not made public until the Federal Railroad Administration came through with a $572 million grant for the maintenance facility, a separate $87 million grant for bridge repairs, and another over $37 million specifically for the South Branch Bridge.

"And once the funding came through, everything got really ramped up. So in between the funding and that last meeting with Amtrak and the Canal Edge folks, a presentation was done by Amtrak at UIC, and somebody sent me a slide, a picture with three different phases of development for the south end of the yard, which I'd never seen before," Lee said.

Open Secrets tracks lobbying in Washington, D.C. Canal Edge's three hired lobbying companies are Penn Avenue Partners, Harbinger Strategies, and Accelerated Strategies.

Between the 2025 4th quarter payments and 2026 3rd quarter, Canal Edge LLC has spent $410K and is on track to drop upwards of half-a-million dollars if the 2026 4th quarter payment is the same as the $130,000 Q3 price tag. Some Q2 lobbying payment dates hitting less than a month before the FRA granted Amtrak $659 million for the project, with Ishbia's $125 million contribution bringing the total to over $821 million.

I asked political analyst Thom Serafin how much he thinks the lobbying we've looked at that Canal Edge has done factored into Amtrak getting that grant.

"Well, there are no coincidences in the federal government, nor in Springfield," Serafin said.

Remember, Canal Edge's ultimate goal is to commercially develop the 14th Street Yard. Per Crain’s Business reporting, a separate Ishbia-led entity, City River Holdings, is seeking a $1.8 billion loan from a federal loan program, the Railroad Rehabilitation and Improvement Financing, or RRIF. Per the Department of Transportation, borrowers can finance up to 100% of the project, have freedom to adjust repayment plans, lower fixed interest rates, and interest won’t accrue until proceeds are drawn, up to a 35-year repayment period, and defer payments for five years after the project is complete.

"Well, they're deadly serious about what they call redevelopment of that part of the world," Serafin said. "So as much as these people can get government to pay for the overhead, that's less they have to pay for. So it's a big deal and they're going for it."

What's next:

As for the Canal Street Yard, residents have until Dec. 7 to weigh in on the environmental assessment.

Maria Lagiglio, and a small group outside an event Ishbia was speaking at, echoed what she said in September.

"We're here because we're not gonna stop. We're gonna fight every day until there are shovels in the ground for this facility. Our children's future matters," Lagiglio said.

As for the Canal Street Yard, there’s a public meeting Dec. 2 at Illinois Institute of Technology's Hermann Hall. Amtrak has an Eventbrite link to register.

Based on the environmental assessment, shovels are expected to be in the ground for construction to start in January.