$400M rail tunnel on track
Published: September 26th 2009
Source: Chris Vander Doelen, The Windsor Star

CP Rail has been quietly advancing its plans for a new $400-million rail tunnel under the Detroit River and will probably start digging two years from now -- around the same time work starts on a new bridge.

Richard Blouse, president and CEO of the Detroit Regional Chamber of commerce, says he expects CP officials will give the green light before the end of the year to dig a large-diameter tunnel big enough to allow double-stacked railway cars to pass under the Detroit River.

A construction permit for the new tunnel has already been issued on the U.S. side, sources said Friday, but the environmental assessment process has only just begun on the Canadian side and will take up to 18 months to complete.

CP and its partners have been quietly lining up Canadian political support for the rail-only project, although excavation probably won't start for at least two years, sources indicate. The number of construction jobs alone to be created by the project will run into "thousands," according to one.

"Some time before Christmas you'll hear more about this rail tunnel we've been hearing about for years," Blouse told a breakfast meeting of the Windsor chamber this week. "It's going to get built.

"I'm told it's imminent," Blouse said later when pressed for more details. "It would be good to hear an announcement to get it going -- it's a very major part of the infrastructure we need."

Mike Rohrer, director of community and business relations for the pension funds which own the existing tunnel, confirmed Friday that construction plans are moving forward. But he cautioned that the final decision is still some distance off.

The century-old existing tunnel being used by CP "needs to be replaced," Rohrer said. "It's coming, but we're not there yet. Expect good news in the near future."

While the construction jobs will be a godsend for the depressed region, Blouse told the Windsor chamber the best news about the rail-only tunnel are the opportunities it will open up for the region.

When completed, the new rail tunnel will plug the largest remaining gap in the local infrastructure needed to help turn the region into an "inland port" and cargo hub.

Coupled with a new international bridge downriver from the Ambassador Bridge -- plus a few port improvements, such as the addition of a some tower dock cranes capable of plucking containers off ocean-going vessels -- Blouse says "the Detroit region" will be poised to capture some of the "hundreds of thousands of jobs" up for grabs in the world's shipping business.

While Windsor mayor Eddie Francis and others have been steadily hammering away at the cargo hub concept for the past year, it turns out Detroit's business community has been doing exactly the same thing.

They're even targeting major Canadian transportation players to help them achieve their goal, including CN and CP Rail, and the ports of Montreal and Halifax.

In the next few weeks, members of Blouse's board will visit Halifax to figure out how Detroit can divert thousands of cargo containers from the current shipping route between Rotterdam and ports on the southern U.S. coast such as Savannah., Ga.

Detroit wants to see more containers offloaded onto CN trains that originate in Halifax, bound for its giant Toronto yards and points West. Halifax is currently handling less than half the 1.2 million containers it is capable of receiving.

"Time is money in the shipping business and using Halifax cuts two days off the trip" from Europe to most of the U.S. market, Blouse points out. "But we're not wedded to CN and Halifax."

CP Rail's connection to international shipping lanes via the Port of Montreal could also be used to achieve the same goal, but not until the new Windsor-Detroit tunnel opens.

CP's plans to acquire a larger tunnel to the U.S. has been around for more than a decade -- at least since CN stole a march on its smaller competitor by building its own double stack rail tunnel in Sarnia. The two companies shared the Windsor-Detroit route until Sarnia opened.

The Windsor project was on hold for years while CP and its partners tried to raise money for the new tunnel by convincing governments to turn the old tunnel into a truck route. That bid, known as the DRTP, died when bureaucrats decided a new downriver bridge was the preferred solution to the region's international traffic problems.

Blouse and his members agree completely with the border solution chosen by the bureaucrats. "We support a second bridge, and after 9-11 we support redundancy. Modern terrorists, the way they work today, they would easily blow up two bridges at once if they were side-by-side" -- as the Ambassador Bridge has long insisted it should be allowed to do exclusively. "We need two bridges."

Blouse says getting into the logistics industry in a bigger way is the perfect fit for people in the Windsor-Detroit region, who have more than a century of experience shipping millions of parts for the automotive industry.

"We have people who are the best in the world at moving stuff through a supply chain on a just-in-time basis."

The region doesn't have a choice but to chase the shipping jobs, he said. "We've lost one million jobs since the year 2000, and they aren't coming back, folks."

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