How does society do hard things? Re-creating Uptown Normal took a quarter century and it's still not quite done. Downtown Bloomington revitalization has taken decades and is, just now, getting out of the starting gate. Efforts like the Bloomington Public Library expansion had several trial balloons unceremoniously pop before the project truly rose into the air.

It turns out these heavy lifts have a lot in common. In Part 1 of our series Hard Things, WGLT unpacks the generational project that brought faster passenger train service to Illinois.