ELWOOD, Ill. – Retired businessman and rural landowner Dick Tyler is looking at a farm divided – his farm, that is.

Tyler’s 68-acre family homestead lies directly in the path of one of the three preferred routes, or corridors, being eyed for the $3 billion IIlliana Expressway, a 47-mile public-private partnership that would cut a 400-foot wide swath through the center of his farm, from east to west. Just a truck horn’s breath away from his front door, he said.

“I could throw rocks and hit a truck as it goes by,” Tyler noted. “Or, I can bulldoze my house, if the most feasible location for the expressway is my home.”

The currently preferred corridor for the Illiana Expressway - a project designed to reduce traffic, especially truck traffic on Interstates 80 and I-80/94 - would extend from Interstate 55 somewhere north of Wilmington, Ill., to Interstate 65 at Lowell, Ind. Published reports predict a 193 percent increase in truck traffic through the area by the year 2040, and for its population to grow 176 percent.

The area is just south of Joliet, and teems with intermodal terminals that transfer truck trailers or shipping containers from railroad freight cars to semi-trailer trucks for transport to their destinations.

The Illiana plans include a 2,000-foot wide corridor through Will and Lake counties in Illinois and Indiana, which will shrink to 400 feet wide for the expressway itself.

Village Board President Joe Cook of Channahon, Ill., whose community lies at the intersection of Bluff Road and I-55, noted several versions exist of the A and B routes for the expressway. The Plan A versions would terminate at I-55 on Bluff Road at Channahon. Plan B would terminate at I-55 between Channahon and Wilmington.

“My understanding is that the Illinois Department of Transportation and consulting engineers evaluated all the different proposals and came up with Plan B as the best route. From what they tell me, they wanted to move forward with the B route. But I guess the environmentalists, the Sierra Club and a couple of those groups, asked why there wasn’t a viable alternative,” Cook said on June 5.

“So, A became Route A and the A3S2 Route became the viable alternative. IDOT and the consultants came back to us and said, ‘From our perspective, this isn’t the preferred route, but this is to let you know it’s still out there on the table.’”

Cook said his board supports the Illiana Plan B route, with the I-55 interchange about five miles south of Channahon and about as far north of Wilmington.

“We are supportive of the Illiana Expressway and we are supportive of the B route. The B route gives us more opportunity for economic development. We have good industrial properties north and west of that interchange that could be redeveloped. That’s our concern. It’s not that we’re opposed to the Illiana,” he said.

“We think Plan A would be a detriment to Channahon. They were talking about 20,000 vehicles a day at our town. We don’t have the transportation structure to handle that. If something happens and those vehicles have to get off the expressway, it would have a terrible impact on our community.”

The Channahon Board recently notified IDOT and the Illiana Expressway group of the village’s concerns.

“If when they come back with more details of what it may look like, with A as the choice, we’ll take a look at it, and determine whether to support it,” Cook said. “I anticipate this looking a lot like I-355 and I-80 where there are no off ramps, and a huge piece of land was taken up (for ramps that were never built).”

Tyler said the A route would force about 30 people out of their homes at Channahon. He said the expressway would be better routed on property used by the Joliet Army Training Area, and earmarked for transfer to the Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie, 40 miles south of Chicago on Illinois 53.

Midewin was once the site of the 25,000-acre Joliet Army Arsenal, the world’s largest TNT factory that produced high explosives for World War II, and the Korean and Vietnam wars. The arsenal closed in the 1970s, and Congress transferred 19,000 acres of it to the U.S. Forest Service in 1996 to create the nation’s largest prairie preserve east of the Mississippi River.

IDOT recently notified Tyler and other landowners that their properties are being considered as one of the two proposed expressway routes. The A3S2 route would divide Tyler’s farm.

“The route runs west from I-65 and just south of Cedar Lake, Ind., then just north of the proposed airport in Peotone, Ill., south of Monee, and a little south of Manhatten,” he said. “It juts right through my farm to the new intermodal facility on the south side of Joliet.”

He said this would further disrupt the community which already has 4,000 trucks passing the Elwood (population 2,357) outskirts daily.

IDOT agents will enter the landowners’ properties to conduct environmental and ground surveys and geotechnical investigations. Joining them will be the Army Corps of Engineers, state and federal EPA agencies, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Illinois Departments of Natural Resources, Agriculture and Natural History. The work is to go through the summer of 2014.