A rising tide of infrastructure funding floats new hope for Great Lakes shipping
Trains and trucks move the bulk of goods across the U.S. Some sailors say the Great Lakes waterways are underused shipping options and hope $17 billion of federal investment can help revitalize them.
Behind barbed wire and tangled between highways and railroads on Chicago's South Side, the dockside at Iroquois Landing is often a hive of activity. In late fall, forklifts and dump trucks rushed to get pallets of lumber and mountains of iron ore off ships before Great Lakes locks and canals froze to a halt on Jan. 5.
But Iroquois Landing is only a small part of the International Port of Illinois, and elsewhere it looks far different.
Six miles further down the Calumet River, there's a vast expanse of water and asphalt that sits mostly empty. Grain silos and rusty ships from the 1950s remain from a bygone era when massive
