Chicago

Get On Board.

Everyone’s watching the team. We are watching the trains.

By Jason C. Wandel and Claude for Chicago Register · Monday, November 2, 2026

Here’s what you’ll be reading over the next few years.

1. You are here · Nov. 2, 2026Red stops nobody else is calling
2. 1Springfield passes the stadium deal after Pritzker wins. Paying off Soldier Field rides inside it.
3. 2The buying starts in Bridgeport. Deeds from 33rd to 39th, Canal to Halsted, go to LLCs with names you won’t recognize.
4. 3Amtrak’s yard goes into the ground at 33rd.
5. 4Ishbia takes control of the Sox and they head for the river.
6. 5The Bears stay in Chicago. Arlington Heights gets a neighborhood built around its Metra stop, homes over shops, and the Bears cash out the land for more than they paid.
7. 6The Bears land on the rails in the South Loop, between Roosevelt and 35th, a short walk from the Sox. Two stadiums, one district, one rail line.
8. 7A passenger stop shows up on a plan near 35th Street.
9. 8The link that runs trains from the south straight into Union Station gets its money.
10. 9One tap rides CTA, Metra and Pace.
11. 10Chicago gets a Super Bowl.

None of that will be news when it happens. It’s already in the land deals, the grants, the bills and the calendar. The stop gets announced after the dirt changes hands. That’s why nobody’s saying it.

Chicago has been staring at the Bears for three years. Arlington Heights. Hammond. Soldier Field. Back to Arlington Heights. We have been watching the tracks they’re all riding on.

Union Station is the third busiest train station in the country. More than 300 trains a day. About 120,000 riders. Amtrak wants it to be the front door for every passenger train in the Midwest, and it can’t get there with its repair yard parked at 14th Street, right where the station needs room to grow.

So the yard moves to old Union Pacific ground between 33rd and 35th. Amtrak buys the Union Pacific yard. Justin Ishbia’s company, Canal Edge, builds Amtrak’s new yard. Amtrak buys the finished yard back with federal grants, more than half a billion dollars of them. Then, Ishbia’s Shore Capital closes on the 47 acres Amtrak leaves behind.

The public money passes through his company before he buys anything.

Ishbia is the White Sox owner in waiting. The team’s lease at Rate Field runs out in 2029. So does his option to take control. His plan for the old Amtrak yard, The Railyards, puts a ballpark, a Northwestern Medicine campus, housing and offices on the river next to Union Station. The renderings already cover more than 80 acres, and his side keeps buying the blocks around it.

When the Sox leave, Rate Field stays put. The state owns it, plus about 70 acres of parking. Last week a drawing from Skidmore, Owings & Merrill put a domed Bears stadium right there.

That’s one address on the strip. Ishbia’s Railyards is another. So is The 78, just south of Roosevelt, and One Central, a 34-acre plan next to Soldier Field. Every one of them sits on the rails. Pick any two and you’ve got what Seattle, Philadelphia and Kansas City already built. Two stadiums sharing the parking, the trains, the bars and the hotels, each team keeping its own register.

The Bears have time. The Soldier Field lease runs to 2033. They own 326 acres in Arlington Heights, bought for $197 million, with its own Metra stop, in a town where the typical household makes about $118,500. If the stadium goes to the city, that land isn’t a loss. It’s the other half of the trade. The Bears win either way. Nobody has to rush, and nobody is.

Hammond was never serious. It was leverage, and it worked.

Tomorrow Pritzker wins a third term. The veto session opens Nov. 17. The stadium deal is sitting in Springfield in two halves, one passed by each side of the Capitol, waiting to be stapled together.

Read the House half all the way down and there’s a category written just for blighted or underused rail yards in Chicago. To get the tax break, a rail yard project has to bring in 10,000 new daily transit riders. The trains are now written into the tax law.

Amtrak priced all three of its moves. A new repair yard in Bridgeport, $900 million and up. A bigger Union Station, $97.3 million. A link that runs trains from the south straight into the station, $146.5 million.

Union Pacific is selling Amtrak the ground for that yard.

Washington sent more than half a billion dollars in rail grants to build it, plus $87 million to fix the viaducts on the way in.

BNSF is in talks to sell Ishbia its 20-acre yard and the air over Metra’s.

Metra gets $36 million for new track at The 78, paid out of that development’s own tax deal.

The state put the CTA, Metra and Pace under one new boss, the Northern Illinois Transit Authority. One boss, then one tap. One fare, every ride logged.

The CTA is studying a rebuild of the north Red Line, the line that runs from Evanston straight to the Sox stop at 35th.

Eight owners of track and tax money. Eight filings. Amtrak says its yard and the Sox plan aren’t connected. Lay the paper side by side and it’s one map.

Ishbia holds the river. Pat Ryan holds the seat at the governor’s table. On Oct. 1 he sat across from Pritzker with Roger Goodell and the legislative leaders. Not Kevin Warren, the Bears president. Ryan, the minority owner who founded Aon, does the talking now.

He’s sat at this table before. Ryan ran Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Olympics. That bid had the city put together an $86 million deal for the old Michael Reese hospital site for an athletes’ village. Chicago lost the Games. The land stayed. It’s Bronzeville Lakefront now, on the same Metra line as everything in this story.

Then Northwestern. Ryan chaired its trustees. He and his wife put up $480 million for the new Ryan Field. Ishbia sits on Northwestern Medicine’s board, and Northwestern is the planned anchor at The Railyards. The governor’s name is on Northwestern’s law school, a $100 million gift from him and his wife.

Three men in this deal share one university. The lawmaker carrying the stadium deal in the House, Kam Buckner, is the same one who welcomed Waymo to Chicago. The ride home after the game is already in the plan.

Related Midwest holds The 78 at the north end of the south lakefront and Quantum Shore at the south end. Amtrak needs its yard. The state owns the dirt under Rate Field. The city signs off.

Everybody covered. That’s what a deal looks like when you work top down. Any sales guy worth his salt will tell you that.

Follow the rails past the stadiums and the board keeps going. Metra Electric already runs from downtown past Bronzeville, the Obama Center and UChicago down to Quantum Shore. The $146.5 million link that would run trains from the south straight into Union Station is priced and still unfunded.

That’s the next ask. Watch for it.

Bridgeport pays first. More than 6,000 people live within 500 feet of the new 24-hour yard. At 14th Street, 29 did. The yard comes first. The Bears can’t build before 2033. Years of trains all night and nothing else going on but the build out. That’s when a tired owner sells cheap to somebody that knows what 2033 looks like and doesn’t have to live there. Or a renter finds a new neighborhood.

Then everybody else. A stadium on public land pays no property tax, so its share moves onto every house and business still on the rolls. The Cook County Treasurer ran the numbers on a tax freeze for a Bears stadium and found the team saves up to $1.5 billion over 40 years. Homeowners make up the difference.

The Treasurer counted the stadium. The money is the neighborhood around it.

The old bills ride along too. About $467 million is still owed on the 2003 Soldier Field rebuild, and the governor wants it paid off first. The new building starts life carrying the old one.

The public builds the rails and ends up owning a stadium that pays no property tax. Private money owns the dirt next to them. When the trains come and the dome goes up, the dirt is what goes up in value. That’s the trade.

The calendar lined up before anyone drew a dome. The grants are awarded, the land is under contract, and Amtrak needs a yard no matter who plays football next door. And the calendar isn’t the only thing pushing.

The city can’t front it. Chicago walks into 2027 $882 million short, still paying on a stadium the Bears want to leave. When the public side is broke, private money fronts the cash and writes the terms.

The federal money is on a clock. Grants awarded today can get cut by the next Congress. Money poured into concrete can’t be pulled back out. The fastest way to protect the money is to spend it.

The lakefront is locked. Soldier Field sits on public trust lakefront, and Chicago already watched a lawsuit chase the Lucas Museum off that shoreline. The rail land a few blocks west has no lakefront lawsuit waiting.

The dome is the NFL’s ask. Goodell has said a great stadium can host more than football. A roof is how Chicago gets a Super Bowl, a Final Four and concerts in January. A dome makes money on more than ten Sundays a year.

Clip it. Check it in 2028.

Sources

The read is ours.