New rail tunnel for Detroit-Windsor?

The 101-year-old under-river rail tunnel linking Windsor, Ontario and Detroit, Michigan might be up for replacement.

Earlier this summer, the Windsor Port Authority (WPA), Canadian Pacific Railway (CP) and Borealis Infrastructure (a division of the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System) formed a public-private partnership to pursue opportunities for the development, funding and construction of a replacement rail tunnel under the Detroit River. The new entity is called the Continental Rail Gateway (CRG) coalition.

The current freight tunnel opened in 1909. It handles approximately 350,000 railcars each year and remains, in the words of the CRG, in excellent condition. But the tunnel cannot handle double-stacked nine-foot, six-inch containers or some new generations of multi-level railcars used by shippers and auto manufacturers. The tunnel clearance was enlarged in 1994, and cannot be expanded further.

According to the CRG, replacing the tunnel will make the region more competitive as a logistics hub for manufacturers, agricultural shippers and other importers, since it would allow double-stacked container trains to travel all the way from the Port of Montreal to Chicago.

The CRG has submitted a project description to Transport Canada as the first formal document submitted under the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act. If given the go-ahead, the project would take three years to complete and create over 2,200 direct and indirect jobs.

Each member of the CRG has agreed to work to raise awareness of the project’s value among government and industry stakeholders on both sides of the border.