(folksy music) - Here's the kind of Chicago map most of us are familiar with, showing the streets, but trains run in a sort of parallel universe.

They follow pathways of their own.

Of course, there are times when those parallel universes intersect.

(train rumbling) (bell ringing) We've all been here before, stuck at a railroad crossing, waiting for a mile long freight train to pass.

Fortunately, there's a group that's doing something about this.

(lighthearted music) A decades long multi-billion dollar multi-agency project with the acronym CREATE will weave railroads and streets over, under, and around each other so trains and cars can flow freely without interruption.

(welder torch sparking) - This is the Super Bowl of railroading in not just the USA, but in North America.

It's part of what makes this region the undisputed champion of freight.

- [Geoffrey] CSX railroad's Tom Livingston took me to America's busiest railroad intersection to illustrate the problem.

It's at 75th Street on Chicago's south side.

- This is a major conflict point.

It would be like taking two of your major interstates in this region and putting a four-way stop sign.

It's just really everybody has to wait.

There is no close second place to Chicago in terms of daily freight exchange.

And so when Chicago gets a cold, the rest of the country gets (Geoffrey laughing) the flu!

- To solve the problem here, CREATE is building a mile and a half long bridge to carry the north south trains over the east west trains.

So that first day when a train goes across, are you nervous?

Like is it gonna hold?

- (chuckles) No, I know it's gonna hold.

I mean, this has been designed for the last 200 years.

It's like a heart bypass for freight rail in the city, and that begins to unlock the rest of the country.

- [Geoffrey] This is just one of 70 projects in the CREATE program, which started in the early 2000s and still has years to go.

- It's a make no small plans industry in a make no small plans city.

(train rumbling) - Still waiting.

(train whirring)