It’s a weekday at 2 p.m., and the great Midwest lies at your feet ready to be explored. If you’re feeling a quick trip to the new Marilyn Monroe sculpture and a deep dish pizza run in Chicago, you could find yourself in that action in 45 minutes. How about if you want to make that impromptu visit to your friends from St. Louis that hasn’t happened yet, because three hours on the road sounds pretty dreadful. Well, how about in under 60 minutes? And that part-time job offer up in the suburbs? Pretty manageable now that the time it takes to get there is about the same as driving into the city of Chicago from its suburb.

This picture we’ve painted may have been unrealistic postulating about what our Urbana campus could mean to the great Midwest. But when the Champaign County Board approved 15-8 a resolution in support of constructing a high-speed rail line connecting Champaign-Urbana and Chicago last Thursday, the University’s prospects improved in terms of connecting it to huge pools of potential employees in large metropolitan areas.

Our University is recognized on the global and national scales for being a research institution of the highest caliber, a leader in multiple disciplines and cutting-edge innovation. Students, faculty and staff travel from a myriad of backgrounds to work and study at our proud university — it’s hard to ignore the benefits the high-speed rail would bring to us. Often, a deterrent to recruiting the finest potential faculty members is location, location, location. It’s not a stretch to say professors would choose a job at Northwestern University or the University of Chicago because of the amenities Chicago has to offer.

Apart from its impact on the University, though, job creation and improvement of our community’s economy is an obvious advantage for Champaign-Urbana, especially when funding is tight.

As Republican county board members have alluded to, however, something that needs to be carefully considered is the economic feasibility of the project. Ongoing studies, once published, will investigate its sustainability and the risks that the community would be hedging going into the railway’s construction in the upcoming years.

As we pointed out before, funding is tight. But we hope gradual revenue generation by linking Chicago businesses to local vendors and entrepreneurs and the additional boom to the University’s richness will prove to be greater reasons to be confident in the railway’s construction — not doubtful.