Forest Hill Flyover Marks New Phase for Chicago Rail Operations

On a mild November afternoon on Chicago’s South Side, railroads and public officials finally gathered to celebrate the completion of the Forest Hill Flyover. For a junction long branded the worst freight bottleneck in the country, the mood felt more like relief than ceremony.

This is reported by the railway transport news portal Railway Supply.

The flyover now carries CSX Transportation trains over the crossing used by Norfolk Southern, Union Pacific, the Belt Railway of Chicago, and Metra. And because this spot once forced long strings of freight and commuter trains to stack up for hours, Friday’s event went far beyond a ribbon-cutting.

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How the Forest Hill Flyover changes Chicago rail operations?

Before the Forest Hill Flyover opened on October 15, dispatchers pushed roughly 90 freight trains and about 30 Metra trains a day through a tangle of diamond crossings. Amtrak’s triweekly Cardinal tried to squeeze through the same narrow opening, so delays stacked up in every direction.

Local officials did not mince words. Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle called the junction “a bottleneck that slowed freight and commuter trains, disrupted businesses, and affected the daily lives of thousands of our residents.” For many commuters, that description felt painfully familiar.

Cook County Commissioner Stanley Moore went even further and said trains in the area did not simply slow down; they parked. Residents watched long cuts of cars sit motionless across streets, and businesses planned around those unpredictable stoppages. In practice, the junction illustrated how one bad node can drag down an entire network.

The new structure changes that daily choreography. CSX trains now roll above the other railroads, so dispatchers no longer gamble on narrow timing windows at the diamonds. They gain flexibility, and passengers on Metra trains gain something closer to a predictable schedule.

The project also shows how far the CREATE program has come. The Forest Hill Flyover stands as the 36th completed job on a list of 70 targeted projects, and it ranks among the most complex. The CREATE Program, a long-running public-private partnership, works to modernize Chicago’s rail network, according to the CREATE Program.

Earlier work under CREATE finished with little fanfare, but this one drew repeated visits to the CSX intermodal terminal next door. After several years of planning and incremental funding decisions, the flyover turned into a kind of test case for what coordinated investment can do.

Funding, partners, and what the Forest Hill Flyover means next

Officially, the Forest Hill Flyover cost about $380 million. A 2018 package assembled a $132 million federal grant with roughly $260 million in state, local, and railroad funding, a figure that gives some sense of the project’s scale. State officials also describe CREATE as one of the region’s major infrastructure efforts, grouped among “mega projects” by the Illinois Department of Transportation.

On Friday, speakers described the federal portion as “nearly $120 million,” but the broader message stayed the same: nobody could pay for this alone. Every layer of government, plus the railroads themselves, had to buy into the idea that unclogging this junction justified the price.

Preckwinkle noted that Cook County originally sat outside the CREATE partnership when it launched in 2003. After she took office in 2010, she noticed that gap and, as she put it, “cheerfully” decided the county would buy its way in. The county ultimately committed about $78 million to this project and, in her view, gained a real say in how the region invests in rail.

CSX CEO Steve Angel ran through the numbers and treated them almost like a scorecard. Crews poured about 8,350 cubic yards of concrete and installed roughly 25 million pounds of steel. They logged some 220,000 hours of labor and built nearly 27,000 feet of new track with 26 turnouts; frankly, those figures tell their own story.

Angel also repeated a theme that many speakers touched on: CREATE works because state, federal, local, and private players decide to move in the same direction. Moore echoed that view and said the flyover proves that when partners choose collaboration over conflict, they build things that last. The broader anxiety about future congestion, he suggested, could be summed up the way one planner might put it in a slide deck: “we can see the cliff coming.”

Not everyone showed up this time. Because a federal government shutdown had just ended, no federal officials stood at the podium, even though earlier events at the site drew members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, and Chicago’s mayor. Still, the absence did not dampen the sense that the junction finally reached a turning point.

Illinois Department of Transportation secretary Gia Biagi stepped in to connect the flyover to everyday life. She pointed out that trains moving through this area amount to something like 200 miles of railcars per day, a volume that really stretches the imagination. So when freight slows, she argued, jobs, local businesses, and family routines all feel the impact.

Biagi also tied the job directly to safety and quality of life. Grade separations like this one reduce conflicts between trains and roads, and they give surrounding neighborhoods fewer reasons to worry about blocked crossings. At the same time, they keep freight moving through a corridor that matters to far more than one county.

Now that trains use the new bridge, the railroads plan to erase the old constraints for good. They scheduled a 12-hour operating outage on Saturday to tear out the inactive diamonds, most likely the last major disruption tied to the project. Once crews finish that work, the old version of Forest Hill will survive only in stories about how bad it could get.

For CREATE, the Forest Hill Flyover offers a visible example of what long-term planning and steady funding can deliver. The 75th Street Corridor Improvement Project, which includes the Forest Hill Flyover, now stands out as the largest package within CREATE, according to the 75th Street Corridor Improvement Project. For the railroads and the communities around them, it marks a quieter but more important change: a chokepoint loosens, schedules stabilize, and years of frustration finally begin to fade.

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