* The Sun-Times earlier this week…

Amtrak’s new maintenance facility in Bridgeport will undergo a federal environmental review after community pushback over the project initially being allowed to move forward without one, according to the Federal Railroad Administration. […]

It comes after months of public outcry from local residents who worry the new facility could pose health hazards and generate smells and sounds that could tank property values. An initial review from the FRA determined the project would have a minimal noise, air quality and groundwater impact on the surrounding community.

Also behind neighbors’ ire: The move comes hand-in-hand with potential future White Sox owner Justin Ishbia’s companies helping to finance Amtrak’s move while purchasing the existing rail facility, which it wants to develop as a site for a proposed new stadium for the South Side team.

In a joint statement Monday, Ishbia’s company, Canal Edge, and Amtrak said they welcomed the “opportunity for additional review, dialogue and feedback.”

* Sen. Bill Cunningham (D-Chicago), Senate Democrats’ point person on stadium legislation, discussed the Bridgeport opposition and his own experience dealing with railroads on the Sox in the Basement podcast…

I have sympathy for the people in Bridgeport and Armour Square because, as you point out, they’re facing a potential double whammy: losing the White Sox, who have played in the area for their entire history, 125 years, and then having what has been a dormant rail yard started back up with a rail maintenance facility.

So I understand why they’re pushing back against that. I also have sympathy for [Ald. Nicole Lee] and the other elected officials there because I know from experience as a local elected official how difficult it is to deal with railroads. […]

When I first became a legislator, that line was owned by the Canadian National Railway. They sold it to CSX. CSX told us at the time they were maybe running two or three trains a day. They said, “Yeah, we’re going to increase the trains, but we’re not going to run them during rush hour, and we’re going to put a cap on it, and they’ll mostly run at night.”

And we said, “well, what about 95th Street, a major ambulance thoroughfare to Christ Hospital?” At that time, Christ Hospital was the only trauma center on the South Side. If you got in a car accident or got shot south of like 47th Street, you were in an ambulance on 95th Street going to Christ Hospital.

So we’re like, “You can’t block this intersection.” “Don’t worry, we won’t. If we block the intersection because of a stopped train, we’ll break the train after 10 minutes.”

Never did any of that stuff. We went crazy. I was introducing bills in Springfield. [Mayor Jim Sexton] was introducing ordinances here in the Village of Evergreen Park. Matt O’Shea, the alderman of the 19th Ward, was doing the same. Meaningless. They’re all unconstitutional, as you said. Only the federal government can regulate railroads. We have almost no say whatsoever.

I had this conversation with Ald. Nicole Lee, and I told her, like, ‘I feel bad for you. I get what you’re doing, and you have to do this, and should do this, but you don’t have a lot of cards to play. In fact, you might not have any.’

The one benefit Bridgeport has that we didn’t have here is they are not dealing with one of the big freight carriers. They are dealing with Amtrak. Amtrak is a publicly facing rail company. They want to sell tickets to ordinary people, where, you know, CSX, their customers are big corporations. […]

There’s the old cliché: You can’t fight city hall. You can fight city hall. You can’t fight the railroads. That’s my lesson learned being an elected official here, and Bridgeport’s finding that out now.

Again, they have a fighting chance because it’s Amtrak. It’s not one of the freight carriers, so I think that they might be able to extract some sort of concessions out of them. But it will be difficult.