Do I think the F40s are running 40% efficiency? Probably not. Also the grid is on regardless of if trains are running or not and the incremental increase in power required to run an electric rr is negligable especially considering NE IL's nuclear heavy generation mix. Also the overall emissions profile of grid power is always going to be superior to internal combustion engines on a unit of energy basis, especially as coal is pushed off the grid in the next decade.

I don't really expect Metra to go whole hog electrified anytime soon. Most likely if they get a lot of funds they'd buy more Chargers. They could potentially however experiment with something like the Stadler Flirt Akku on the Rock Island which would require limited catenary installs for recharging en route and at terminals/yards

https://www.chicagobusiness.com/greg...ervice-chicago

March 10, 2021 04:21 PM |



Amtrak to restore service from Chicago



The COVID relief bill passage means the national rail service has the money to restart daily long-distance service on several key lines and recall more than 1,000 furloughed workers.

Greg Hinz  


...

New Metra railcar update here.

Damen CTA station to start construction in 2021:

https://chicagoyimby.com/2021/03/dam...west-side.html

Yep. Still no explanation of the delay beyond "something something Covid" but I'm glad they're finally bidding it.

The drawing set is posted publicly for bid. Over 1000 sheets of drawings. You'd think CDOT was building an aircraft carrier. It really should not be this hard to build some platforms, stairs, and elevators.

Officials are starting to line up which projects they'd like to see funded from Biden's infrastructure proposal. A lot of interesting stuff in this article

Red Line ‘L’ extension? New Lake Shore Drive? Biden’s jobs plan has Illinois and Chicago officials pushing infrastructure wish lists.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/polit...dg4-story.html

I was just going to post this. Its a long article.

Lets finish CREATE

https://www.createprogram.org/

Yes, fully fund all remaining CREATE projects. This is the chance.

^ Much as I hate to say it, I think CREATE might need to go back to the drawing board in some respects with CP's purchase of KCS. Now instead of being on the fringes of CP's freight network, Chicago will be the linchpin of that network. Planners should study how train traffic is likely to shift and what improvements need to be made. CP's routes through the Chicago area include both Milwaukee District Metra lines, which also host the Hiawatha/Empire Builder and the proposed Rockford service on the Amtrak side.

Also, they need to dust off the South-of-the-Lake project to build a dedicated passenger corridor between Englewood and Porter, IN through the tangle of railroads on the South Side and in NW Indiana. Huge upside for all Amtrak service to the east. Unfortunately Michigan led the charge 8 years ago under Gov and noted railfan Rick Snyder, I dunno if Gretchen "Fix the Damn Roads" Whitmer is quite so supportive of rail.

Arguments for a CREATE Phase 2 I think. There are a lot of projects from the first plan just still waiting for money.

CN's purchase of EJE resulted in deletions from CREATE rather than added projects. If the same is true for CP+KCS then we could end up spending billions adding capacity where we don't need it.

Yes because the EJ&E let CN circumvent a lot of Chicago area congestion. I don't think CP buying the KCS solves a similar Chicago problem that would negate the need for the planned improvements.

Huh? 42 elevators cost $2.1 billion?

I didn't see extending the brown line to connect to the O'Hare blue line on the list. That seems like a no brainer. :shrug:

The infrastructure bill is intended for shovel-ready projects. Hopefully the CTA will start studying a Brown Line extension once other projects are finished

What to make of this?

This isn't the first time CP has considered bypassing Chicago. In 2016, when CP attempted to acquire Norfolk Southern, the railroad wrote this about CREATE-

The passage above is from a white paper written by CP entitled The Opportunity to Alleviate Congestion in Chicago, in which CP argued that combining CP's and NS's assets would allow significant freight traffic to bypass the city.

I agree with you about South of the Lake. When the Amtrak 2035 map came out a few days ago, and it referred to "enhanced" routes, my first thought was South of the Lake would enhance so many routes that reviving it seems like a no-brainer.

Of course, even if there was money to expand the system, money is needed to then operate that system.

---

I don't know if anything can be done to speed up the Metra coaches. But that is a win in terms of maintenance cost, efficiency and experience that arguably shouldn't take so many years.

I also don't know if we are doing enough to get people to job centers like Bedford Park. It isn't flashy, but even just some kind of improved bus service and coverage for overnight shifts

From the HSR thread, the funding breakdown for rapid transit will be:
-$55b state of good repair
-$25b expansion
-$5b for ADA accessibility

with an additional:
-$25b electric transit
-$20b electric school buses
-$44b transformative projects (rail, highway, airports, etc.)

Metra issues challenge to create battery-powered, zero-emission locomotive
 

From Progressive Railroading -

https://i.imgur.com/MvuWqop.jpg

This is a sick joke and the worst kind of greenwashing. Batteries are many times less energy dense than diesel fuel (i.e. much more mass for the same energy output) so it will actually take more energy to move the train due to the mass of batteries. And it locks Metra into the push/pull locomotive model which is also more inefficient than multiple-unit.

Metra keeps asking "the industry" to build things that don't make sense. Hopefully this turns out like the gallery car RFP and they get no responses because this is so boneheaded.

I don't know the details. Obviously at some point battery powered everything is going to beat liquid fuel on fixed, limited range routes. Not today, but if you also consider maintenance costs and the benefits of regenerative braking, that could be significant on a route with numerous stops.

In 10 years, it's going to be cheaper to own and operate any electric car than an ICE car even if gas was free. That is going to happen much faster if it's a car that only does stop-and-go driving on a limited route. Regional rail is probably somewhere on that path too. For example, if we could charge batteries with less voltage than was required to operate them in real time during acceleration, it's possible that electrifying old diesel lines would be simpler and cheaper than going full electric.

I have to imagine that if you replaced a diesel engine with a battery, it's a pretty short hop to have drive systems in every car rather than one big turbine up front.

However, the fact that this doesn't exist already in some other forward-thinking regional rail system leads me to believe that you're right and that it won't pencil out in the near term.

It's just attacking the wrong end of the problem. The energy source isn't the problem, it's the (in)efficiency of how the energy is used.

Metra's trains right now are moving bank vaults. Rather than admitting that maybe they shouldn't be moving 692 bank vaults per day in and out of downtown Chicago, they're trying to claim green cred by saying "what if we moved the bank vaults with batteries"? Of course, the batteries themselves are one more bank vault to strap onto each train!

I'm not even against batteries per se, although pretty much every other developed country continues to conclude that electrification via overhead wire or third rail is superior. If you're going to deploy batteries, you should A) switch to a lightweight train design so much less energy is needed/smaller batteries, and B) use multiple-unit technology so the energy and mass is distributed more efficiently across the length of the train instead of just at the front. Both of these changes also have positive ripple effects in the form of faster travel times for riders due to better performance/acceleration.

Looking forward to 2050 when Metra issues an RFP to retrofit fusion reactors into F40s which are somehow still the bulk of their locomotive fleet.

JFC people if you really want battery trains this bad just buy from the Europeans even though yes they'll look and function like a product actually designed within some of our lifetimes.

Metra Electric at 17% of pre-pandemic levels (seems about right... it's been getting more and more crowded over the last two months, though I also take it in the reverse commute direction which may have different behavior) and adding additional reverse commute options:
https://www.hpherald.com/evening_dig...c4c428fe6.html

I did not realize the extent of the warehouses near the University Park station, and I guess this is before the new Amazon facility
https://i.imgur.com/YKT4IE4.png

(I've taken the ME down there to see the sculpture garden at Gov State, but it's not at all apparent on the ground)

Yeah they added that new interchange at Stuenkel Rd that kickstarted all of the growth. Virtually no friction for trucks getting from highway to dock door.

Of course there is no way to get from Metra station to the jobs, unless the warehouses run shuttles (doubt it).

I know these are enormous buildings but the employee parking areas don't look that big compared to a manufacturing facility. There may not be that many jobs here actually, I know many of these facilities are increasingly automated. The biggest warehouse in that shot is Solo Cup, they only have 60 parking spaces for an almost 3million sf building.

Amazon's new fullfllment center is planning shuttles, apparently!

Construction delayed once again.

Metra’s New Edgewater Station Delayed Yet Again As City Nixes Transit Agency’s Green Groundwater Plan

And during that delay China would have built another metro line.

Lol. Unbelievable.

Wonder what the infrastructure bill would bring home transit-wise if passed.

It's unlikely we would see anything new or surprising - the region has a long to-do list and Congressmen have been required to select projects from this list for earmarks, they can't just pick any pet project.

I outlined some of the likely candidates here:
https://skyscraperpage.com/forum/sho...ostcount=15231

That post was the "big fish" but there are countless small or medium sized projects across the region that have been sitting on to-do lists for years without funding. In Chicago for example there are a lot of bridge replacements.

Taking the ME to lab this afternoon and it's packed much more than any of my recent weekday trips (to be fair, I'm a reverse commuter). Also, they just announced that the Homewood stop is flooded?

My guess is that some of the stations needing elevators would need to be completely reconstructed. $50 million to rebuild a station and add an elevator sounds about right. Adding two elevators to the Loop's Quincy station cost over $18 million, and that was relatively straightforward.

Quincy has special historic status though, right?

Well, sort of. Decades ago, the CTA and city agreed to restore Quincy in return for being able to modernize the rest of the Loop stations. In the end, it was more reconstructed than restored, but whatever.

However, the elevators were added in quite a straightforward way—by extending the platforms to new towers from the sidewalk—thus requiring no alteration of the historic station house.

14 out of those 41 stations are included in the RPM project (4 in the current phase that just kicked off yesterday) so those should be considered separately since the line will be reconstructed. Another 7 are part of the Blue Line Forest Park branch, which is also planned as a standalone reconstruction project.

That leaves only 20 stations to tackle as accessibility projects - 12 outlying stations on the O'Hare branch and the Lake St branch, plus North/Clybourn, and 9 downtown stations. Out of those 20, 11 are subway, 7 are elevated and 2 are expressway median stations.

..

Has anyone heard anything recently about building a connection between the Clinton blue line and Union Station? I wish they'd incorporate it somehow with the BMO tower construction...

^ discussed a few pages back

^ discussed in the BMO thread, not this one.

To recap, BMO will extend a pedestrian passageway through their underground garage to Clinton/Van Buren, but no further.


A further extension south to CTA is not planned at this time, but it might be included in the Forest Park branch rebuild project (whenever that happens). Under that project, Clinton would also get a second entrance and mezzanine at Jefferson by the Greyhound terminal, and maybe a pedway from the existing mezzanine east into the Old Post Office.

^Thank you!

The Clinton station desperately needs a massive overhaul, that much is for sure. For being such a major station so near Union Station and Greyhound, not to mention the OPO, it's in pathetic condition. I hope to see the ped connection to OPO and the additional entrance at Jefferson before I die. ;)

Aaron (Glowrock)

The Clinton blue line station is/was a bit of a no mans land and the physical location of the station is not the most inviting. Could use an overhaul, but I could think of a few stations I'd prefer to see built or redone before the Clinton Blue Line station.

Well as noted it would be part of a larger project for the whole branch which is in a shameful state except for the IMD and UIC stations.

A big point which I didn't realize is that all of these ADA projects also need to bring the stations into compliance with fire code (NFPA130). In most cases that means adding additional emergency exits at the platform ends, regardless of whether that platform is elevated on a narrow viaduct or 80' below ground. That process is very expensive - it's not just a matter of installing an elevator next to the existing stairs.

The good news is that auxiliary exits can also be beneficial to passengers as well by making the station more convenient, but the bad news is that NFPA130 compliance is a huge unfunded mandate. By demanding this upgrade, fire officials are deliberately and drastically slowing down the rate that CTA can become fully accessible.

I worked in the Old Post Office a whole few weeks pre covid and took the Blue Line from that station to the Red Line. It is something else lol. It's not dangerous, not needles laying around, not human stuff, or anything like that, it's just there and not maintained. I'm guessing that with the Old Post Office being abandoned for years and not much around that immediate area that station had minimal people traffic. It does need an upgrade, that's for sure. Btw. I had to go into the old Post Office last week for a couple of hours - it's strange that last time I was there the BMO tower was just a construction site with no highrise part that I noticed and now there is an almost completed highrise there. On another note the Old Post Office is perhaps the most impressive buildings I have been in

I've only been in the lobby for the 2019 OHC, but that was indeed very impressive.

The Clinton Station just feels like... a highway underpass next to a greyhound station. Which is what it is...

Perhaps it's just that I used it 5 or more days a week for about a year when I worked in the South Loop that I feel pretty strongly about it. That and the massive amount of new construction (not to mention access to Union Station) of course.

Ardecila, any idea as to when the Forest Park branch renovations might begin on the Blue Line?

Aaron (Glowrock)

If Biden's infrastructure bill passes, this will be a high priority for CTA but currently there are no funds allocated to it.

I would say it is probably top-5 priority for CTA after the RPM project that is underway on the North Side, the Red Line extension, and railcar replacement.

Looking at CTA's actual budget is usually pretty grim and does not inspire confidence in the ability of CTA to ever expand in a meaningful way. Even if the Federal government comes through with a boatload of money it will still flow to rehab of existing infrastructure primarily.

I’m not sure if this subject has been debated to death, but I don’t know why the cta is so dead set on a red line extension. Don’t get me wrong, it would be amazing, but in terms of transit deserts/equity on the South Side seems to me that extending/restoring the green line and better connecting existing Metra lines would be a lot more effective and efficient use of funds.

I’m pretty mad at LL’s decision to not link the CTA and metra because she doesn’t want to divert ridership away from the CTA. Wouldn’t a better transit system bring more ridership to both in the long run without spending the bank? Am I missing something?

The origin of that problem is the RTA exists as a body who decides how to divvy up the dough, but not actually how to run an integrated and intelligent regional transit system.

Right now the ME is cheaper than the CTA for unlinked trips, thanks to the 50% off pilot. Unfortunately the service levels are much worse.