While Norfolk Southern touts benefits expansion will bring to Englewood, residents and contractors reject railroad promises

Since 2014, Norfolk Southern has hired 50 workers who lived in six ZIP codes in and around Englewood, according to a railroad official at a Tuesday community meeting.

Overall, more than a third of Norfolk Southern’s workers in the Chicago area are nonwhite, said Herbert Smith, the railroad’s vice president for government affairs. And these direct hires are only a part of the railroad’s overall impact on Chicago’s Black community, he said.

Behind them, Smith said, come tradesmen and truck drivers, and $85 million in construction contracts that the railroad will begin awarding as soon as the city of Chicago approves the transfer of streets and alleys to Norfolk Southern for its expansion.

The railroad plans to double the size of its intermodal yard at 47th Street and the Dan Ryan Expressway. The City Council is expected to vote on the transfer Jan. 18.

The 47th Street intermodal yard is already the biggest in the railroad’s 22-state network. It’s a crucial stop on the high-speed tracks that connect Chicago with the East Coast.

[ Truck and rail backups clogged roads last year, creating more pollution and raising health risks for Chicagoans near freight corridors ]

By expanding an intermodal yard in the heart of Chicago, and not in a far-flung suburb, railroad officials say the company is boosting the city’s economy, creating jobs and reducing pollution by relying on fewer and shorter truck trips.

“We are Chicago,’’ Smith said. “We are Chicago’s railroad.’’

About 50 people attended Tuesday’s meeting at Kennedy-King College in Englewood, with a few dozen more joining virtually.

Smith spoke and showed videos for about an hour before the audience started interrupting, prompting a question-and-answer session.

Norfolk Southern first started buying homes to make room for the expansion more than a decade ago. The railroad convened Tuesday’s meeting at the insistence of Ald. Jeanette Taylor, of the 20th Ward, which includes the 47th Street yard.

At the meeting, Taylor dismissed the 50 workers hired in nine years as “a bill of goods,’’ especially when compared with the hundreds of African American families that Norfolk Southern has already bought out — at what she called inadequate compensation — to make way for the expansion.

Norfolk Southern is also failing to protect the neighborhood from trucks that haul containers in and out of its yards, she said. These trucks crush roads that have to be repaired over and over at public expense. They also cause air pollution which in her case, she said, caused a newly discovered case of asthma.

“I’m not OK with this,’’ she said. “This is not fair.’’

For five months, Taylor blocked an ordinance introduced by Mayor Lori Lightfoot to transfer the streets and alleys south of Garfield Boulevard to Norfolk Southern.

She said she did so to pressure the railroad to conduct a study on the long-term health impacts of diesel soot from trains and trucks and to hire more Black contractors and employees. Last month she dropped her opposition to the vote.

[ Hundreds of Englewood homes were razed for a railroad expansion. Those who remain on Chicago’s South Side want clean air, green space and jobs. ]

Edward Forte, owner of Precise Construction Systems, and chairman of Black Contractors United, a lobbying and training group, said Chicago requirements that 24% of construction contracts must go to minority businesses are riddled with loopholes. He accused Norfolk Southern of exploiting them.

“What I’m going to do is put you in the same category as all the rest of the agencies running around and giving fake reports and displacing Black people and harming Black people, and then making your money and going about your business,’’ Forte told Smith.

Smith defended the city’s reporting system and said he’s looking forward, based on contracting data filed with the city, “to turning frustration into opportunity and partnerships.’’

Chicago is the country’s largest freight hub, handling half of all U.S. intermodal trains and a total of $3 trillion worth of cargo each year, according to the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning.

And Tuesday’s debate about the impact of such freight movements on residents likely won’t be the last.

Instead of just expanding the 47th Street yard to the south, Taylor said the railroad has told her it now wants to buy homes and businesses around the yard’s northern entrance near the Dan Ryan expressway.