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Live too far from a train station? Build a new one!

by David Breisch (RSS feed) on Nov 13th 2008 at 2:30PM

Jimmy Gierczyk is not your typical real estate developer. As a resident of Buffalo City, MI, Gierczyk has been hard at work helping build this little town into a getaway location for bored Chicagoans. It's about an hour away and, interestingly enough, Buffalo City already has an Amtrak station - but only on one of the two lines that go through the town, and it's on the outskirts. The other line passes right through downtown, but there's no station to stop at.

Enter Mr. Gierczyk. Instead of waiting for Amtrak to try and find the money to build a new station, he decided to just do it himself - at a cost of over $1.5 million. His overall goal is attracting more Chicago tourists and real estate buyers to the area, and if it works, it'll pay off for his business nicely.

Amtrak, of course, is perfectly agreeable to creating a new station stop now that a shiny new station exists there. As for Gierczyk, he now has a train station in the middle of downtown. It'll create tourism, it'll drive the economic growth of the downtown area, and it's also right at the front door of his condominium complex. How convenient!

[Via Chicago Sun-Times]

Filed under: Stories, North America, United States, Transportation