Emathias, is the line of which you speak essentially the 1968 Monroe circulator?
http://www.chicago-l.org/plans/image...TD-1968map.jpg

I am with you on putting some variant of that where there is already existant intensity. Not to say a circulator such as circle line would not be useful as well. I think it would be. It is as you say a matter of priorities.

Ideally, i'd have such a variant of the monroe circulator, some variant of the circle line, and an outer loop maybe along western.

I really think if chicago's L system transitioned to a more dense graph from the relatively sparse graph it is now that ridership would would transition from under performing on a per mile basis to over performing on a per mile basis

On an aside did the above monroe line contemplate transfer stations between the north redline maybe at division of chicago and the circulator line? This would increase usefulness at first glance

As soon as I get $100 billion I will build you guys 10 concentric looped subways radiating out from the CBD all the way to Beverly so that you can get everywhere in Chicago.

Can we hold you to that?

Almost all residential? By Streeterville, I'm including everything between Michigan and LSD and the River - but theoretically also LSE.

That puts people 1/2 mile closer to Navy Pier, and serves North Pier, the Northwestern Medical campus, the Northwestern University Law campus, the Hancock building, and, don't forget, dozens of big hotels in the area.

"Can you get there via train currently" is properly answered with a Yes. Is it advantageous for you to use the train to get there - perhaps not. Have I made that transfer myself? Yes.

To most parts of Lincoln Park, you'd still need two transfers to get there. Especially at late hours with lowered frequency of service, I'm not sure two transfers would leave you with quite the advantage you have in mind.

Like I said, I don't think what you're advocating is without merit - we simply disagree on prioritization. You seem awfuly worked up about the whole thing. The changes I advocate for aren't because I'd personally benefit from them, I advocate them because I think the numbers show them to be the most useful to the largest number of riders (both residents and visitors). Maybe I'm misreading your intent, but you personalize a lot of your examples, so it comes across as you advocating for something purely because you think it will benefit you. If that's the case, I think it clouds your judgement. I don't live in the West Loop, and I don't live in Streeterville. I still think a subway connecting them would add a lot of value, particularly if done as part of a larger set of system enhancements - in particular the Streeterville section would enable a better north-south link between the north and south lakefront areas.

No, you don't walk to Clark Lake, you exist State/Lake subway station and transfer to State/Lake elevated station if you come down on the Red Line. If you come down on the Brown or Purple Line, you transfer at Adams/Wabash or Clark/Lake. A Lincoln Park to, for example, Randolph Street restaurant trip would be unlikely to be improved by your suggested routing now that there's a Morgan/Green stop, so it's actually a poor example for your case. I'm not saying there aren't other, better, cases to be made, but getting from Lincoln Park to, say, Moto will be very easy via the 'L' with the completion of the Morgan station. Red to Green is an easy transfer, and Purple/Green during rush hour is also easy. Brown/Green is a little longer, but only by about 6 minutes.

It would be a large conveniene for anyone living or working in the West Loop, wanting to get to Michigan Avenue or McCormick Place or the Museum Campus, for anyone arriving in Chicago at Union Station or Ogilvy, or, ultimately for a very large population of persons. Just not of a lot of use for people on the Northwest Side without additional tie-ins.

There is a bunch of stuff up on the CREATE page about the Grand Crossing rail connection project, including diagrams of the alternatives.

For the southern half of the project, there are two alternatives. One which seems sort of like a baseline alternative would would use the NKP flyover of the CN/IC and add a single track between the NS line and the Skyway. The other alternative does both of the things mentioned above plus includes several more new tracks north of the NS right of way where the NKP used to be and where Con Ed has some power lines.

For the northern half, one alternative would hug the east side of the NS ROW adding a track there as far north as 42nd St. The other alternative would build a new connection from the NS line to the Metra SWS line through Englewood from roughly 61st & Stewart to 59th & Wallace and utilize the Metra line from there.

it didn't, but I think a modern version of it would likely try to include that because it would add a lot of value even though it would also add a lot of cost. The 1968 plan had a turnaround circling around the Hancock building. I think a better route for today's needs would be to continue west, turning north under Washington Square, with a transfer station at Clark/Division and then terminating somewhere between Armitage and Fullerton in Lincoln Park, with the potential for a future extension further north along Sheridan or Clark/Broadway.

Your image doesn't seem to be displaying for me (chicago-l.org may prevent direct image linking), but looking at the URL, yes, that's the plan I refer to. Specifically, the green portion. The subway loop, I think, would be too expensive for limited utility improvement.

I think using the 1968 plan, with the north extension to NOrth Ave I mention above, would greatly enhance the utility of a Circle Line because it gets people from the west to the far east part of downtown for festivals and events in addition to Michigan Ave and the CBD. Ultimately, almost any two projects will yield better results than just the sum of them done individually.

This project keeps getting worse and worse. Now it's just blatantly a subsidy for NS.

The best and cheapest option is simply to run Amtrak trains all the way up the St Charles Air Line to a new direct connection into Union Station. This alignment is 100% grade separated with no tight curves and will soon have zero freight interference. If there is a connection at Grand Crossing at all, it should be in the northeast quadrant moving trains from Michigan and points east onto the SCAL.

Why depress roads all over the place, rip up half of Englewood (not exaggerating here) and spend hundreds of millions of public dollars so that one track can be installed that NS will ever-so-kindly share with Amtrak, assuming Amtrak can fit into its busy freight schedule...

What a racket. The railroads have figured out, yet again, how to get billions of dollars of taxpayer money while contributing very little to the general welfare.

^ You are definitely one of the 2 or 3 top transportation experts on this forum, and I'm sure I'm not the only one here who appreciates your input. But I'm just wondering, isn't it the whole purpose of the CREATE project to benefit Chicago's freight rail system? Untying freight bottlenecks is the primary purpose of this investment, while benefitting passenger rail is seen as a secondary goal; is that not correct?

Btw, using public dollars to benefit private companies is certainly not just happening in one part of Chicagoland. We all know that the O'Hare expansion will ultimately be rigged to benefit United and American Airlines, even though funding for the project will be mostly on the taxpayer's dime.

^^^ Well I think increasing the dominance of United Airlines is a critical goal for the City of Chicago, especially now that they gobbled up Continental. If United does well, then the City will benefit from increased employment, increased tax revenue, increased route options, increased reputation, etc... Helping United become the biggest global airline by crowding out the competition should be a priority for Chicago.


Same applies for freight rail. Chicago should do everything in its power to maintain its role as the critical center of shipping in the USA. It's not as if the city and private interests didn't work together to screw the rest of the country in the first place by ensuring that all the railroads terminated, and didn't just have stations, in Chicago. We intentionally made ourselves a choke point so we could control the industry and it's high time we re-embrace that role and improve our choke point so it can again become an engine of growth.

The hidden point in the Grand Crossing project (which I can't find a single mention of in their presentation) is that NS is already buying up all the property south of Garfield to expand their rail yard to 61st.

How on earth will taxpayers be on the hook for O'Hare expansion? Aren't those strictly revenue bonds rather than G.O. bonds?

Where did you get that idea? Railroads in the 19th century were as cutthroat and uncoöperative as it's possible to imagine. But railroads were initially ways to link busy waterways overland to distant ports, or to bring commodities from agricultural and mining hinterlands to ports. Decades before a transcontinental railroad was even thought possible, no one gathered in a room and decided to make Chicago a chokepoint. And a dozen railroads built routes that completely bypassed Chicago in one way or another.

An umlaut? Are you on a german keyboard?

emathias, you're arguing against your own argument. You say that loop should have been put in 50 years ago to accommodate the growth that was just starting to occur, so that it could better serve the capacity that Streeterville has now reached, today. Then you turn around and say that we shouldn't provide new infrastructure to under-served growth areas because we need to serve where people already are. You can't stand on both sides of the fence at once.

Other than that, am I missing something? Are the people who live in Streeterville crying for public transportation? Are they under-served by buses or cabs? I would find a claim to that effect very dubious. If you need to make it from Northwestern to Union Station in under 20 minutes, you're either taking a cab or running, even if there is a subway line, because you can't count on the train being there immediately when you need it anyway.

I think you're all mentally masturbating over this because there's not a whole lot else to talk about at the moment.

Sometimes I think you just like making shit up. The first railway in Chicago didn't even go to the East. In fact, the first railroad in Chicago went West to Galena in direct competition with the major waterway you claim the railroads were built to supplement. The Galena & Chicago Union Railway was built between Chicago and Galena with the intent of competing with the Illinois and Michigan Canal - Hennepin Canal water route for bringing the lead from Galena back to Chicago.

The railroads didn't begin elsewhere with the intention of connecting to Chicago's waterways, they began in Chicago with the intention of connecting everyone else to Chicago. However, even that was a brief period that only lasted less than 20 years before Chicago had full connections to the East coast at which point Chicago's business leaders (many of whom built or owned railroads crucial to their businesses) embarked on a plan of intentionally forcing all freight to be sorted in Chicago.

To further point out how absurd your statements are, the Galena & Chicago Union began construction in 1848. The Transcontinental Railway was authorized in 1862 and began construction in 1863. So you are making the absurd claim that no one could possibly have imagined a transcontinental railway a mere 15 years (at most) before the transcontinental railway began construction? That's absolutely absurd considering construction had already began on lines to St Louis and even Kansas City in that time pretty obviously indicating a westward expansion. Why didn't lines get built between St Louis and Indianapolis or Ohio? Because Chicago's business leaders (and State politicians) choked off any possibility of the railways going anywhere but to Chicago where they would stop, the freight would be sorted, and then distributed elsewhere.

I've heard this pseudo cabal of railways, business interests, and politicians mentioned in several places and I can't believe you are denying that it didn't have a major role in making Chicago not just a big station on the railways, but the the "nations freight handler"...

I never said once that we shouldn't provide infrastructure in outer parts of the central area and I'm not on both sides of the fence. Nowhereman1280 is the one saying he thinks a West Loop to Streeterville link is silly and unnecessary (paraphrased). I have said that an outer line is of less pressing need than a central line, but I never said it was silly and unnecessary - in fact in my last post I pointed out that doing two lines would be synergistic and provide better than 1+1 results.

My entire point has been that because we have limited funds, the money should first go to areas that are already set up to take the most advantage of the transit investment. If we can fund both, then by all means let's do both. But I don't think we should do the outer ones first. I would prioritize *both* the 1968 West Loop-Streeterville project *and* the Circle Line ahead of the Red Line extension, for example.

As I've said in multiple posts that it's a matter of prioritizing existing needs and high-density areas ahead of presently developing needs and less-dense areas.

Listen, Nowhereman1280 has tried to make this about Streeterville residents, which really is a very tiny percentage of who would find utlity in the 1968 plan. I focused on Streeterville originally because it has the high density that I thought would make it more obviously a beneficial link, but the plan includes linkes between all of the West Loop, Streeterville, Museum Campus, and McCormick Place. It could also relatively easily be extended to include east Bronzeville and further south, and the east edge of the Lincoln Park neighborhood.

Beneficial links in original plan, without extensions:
1) West Loop train stations to Central Loop, East Loop, greater Grant Park, Museum Campus, Soldier Field, McCormick Place, Streeterville
2) Streeterville/Michigan Ave to greater Grant Park, Museum Campus, Soldier Field, McCormick Place (remember, lots of hotels in Streeterville/Mag Mile district

So you do benefit Streeterville residents, but more than that, you benefit commuters and day-trippers coming from the suburbs by rail who want to get to Grant Park or the Museum Campus or Michigan Avenue. You also benefit people in hotels in Streeterville/Michigan Ave who want to get to McCormick Place. And, yes, you do benefit people who want to get from Streeterville/Mag Mile to the West Loop and vice versa.

Ultimately what connecting Streeterville, McCormick Place, and the West Loop through the central Loop accomplishes is the unification of the Central Area. Whereas the Circle Line seeks to make it easier to work around the Central Area, the 1968 distributor subway makes it easier to operate within the Central Area.

Beyond that:

Extension north to SE corner of the Lincoln Park neighborhood could yield additional benefit of a rail link to the Zoo, the densest part of Lincoln Park, the north portion of the Gold Coast, the Chicago History Museum, a transfer at Clark/Division, and the potential to serve as a different routing tie-in for a Circle Line. Taken together, this could provide a higher-capacity supplement for lakefront express buses and the 151/156 routes. I'm not against buses by any means, but a subway provides more consistent service and frees up road capacity without additional investment in roads. Getting some of the buses off Michigan Avenue would improve the speed there for the remaining buses.

Extension south from McCormick Place would serve the South Lakefront and support development in what should naturally be a highly desirably part of the city. This is much more speculative, so I'm not really advocating it, but the 1968 plan makes this sort of investment more possible.

We'd love there to be more to talk about, 'tis true, but I also do think that the 1968 plan would still be a great benefit to the city - and if that gets funding, then I also think the Circle Line adds a lot of value.

Chicago's Transit Doing Pretty Well
 

I'm not super in to transit and don't come to this thread often, but thought you guys might like this article in The Trib today.

I read it on the el this morning. Kind of surprised really.

^Regarding antiquated rolling stock, can you imagine how much more strapped the agencies would be and how much more negatively the public would perceive them if Chicago had a serious graffiti problem like New York in the 70s-80s or many European systems? Italy comes first to mind, I was last there in '07 and regional and commuter Trenitalia trains are often pretty filthy with many carriages "bombed" with graffiti on the exterior. The Rome metro was also like riding the NYCTA in the mid-80s.

Hasn't a good amount of federal money already been allocated towards the project?

^ I'm not sure that increasing the dominance of any particular Chicago-based company is really what it's cracked out to be.

The reality is, Chicago would benefit more from an entire industry cluster centering themselves here, rather than one or two goliaths who at any time can be swallowed up in a merger or threaten to relocate elsewhere.

What Chicago needs is what the Bay Area and New York have. The Bay Area is the center of web-based companies while New York is the center of about a half a dozen industries. With "industry clusters" you have dozens, even hundreds of highly successful companies who would not think twice about moving anywhere else. And even if they did, it doesn't matter because you have plenty of other companies in place to easily make up for the loss.

So yes, while a strong United is good for Chicago, I think allowing more competition at O'Hare and opening the door to other companies would benefit Chicago much more in the long run.

As I mentioned, a different use of the dollars would shift all Amtrak trains into CN's Lakefront Line, which would permanently get Amtrak out of NS' hair. I'm not saying they shouldn't benefit, but that the public and it's passenger rail system should also be improved.

In the article posted above, NS is already spending $285M to buy up North Englewood for a yard expansion. I don't like the displacements, and NS is low balling the homeowners, but at least they're doing it on the open market without eminent domain.

Then let's see some sort of source that I could use to edumacate myself. Talk about "making shit up!"

The Galena road was built to bring produce and lead to the port at Chicago, not to an interchange with the Michigan Southern. It was the later Alton road that would be in direct competition with the I&M Canal.

I carefully chose the words "thought possible" for the transcontinental railroad. Obviously there had been idle cracker-barrel talk by 1848, but there were only four states west of the Mississippi. Even generalized surveys didn't begin until 1853, and Theodore Judah didn't find a way up the Western Slope of the Sierra until 1860.

They were, but the Mississippi is much harder to bridge at St. Louis than at Rock Island. Here are the major lines as of 1860:

http://www.nps.gov/nr/twhp/wwwlps/le...113map-rrh.gif

I generally agree with this however a pretty substantial engineering solution ($$$) will be needed to re-direct Union Station traffic over the yards and approach tracks and onto the Air Line without doing the whole cumbersome switch/reverse routine west of the station.

$410 million, I think, but it's from airline passenger taxes, not general taxation.

Your snark is amusing considering the corner you are backing yourself into.

When did I say it was taking lead to an interchange with the canal? Why would they bring lead to the canal when I said THEY BUILT THE RAILROAD TO COMPETE DIRECTLY WITH THE CANAL? You said:

"But railroads were initially ways to link busy waterways overland to distant ports, or to bring commodities from agricultural and mining hinterlands to ports."

And I very specfically demonstrated that the exact opposite was true: the first railroads in Chicago were built to nullify the need for ports and bring goods/passengers directly to the cities, which is the OPPOSITE of "interchanging with the canal" as you accused me of saying.

FINALLY the terminus of the Galena & Chicago Union was NOT the port of Chicago, it was near the river at the Wells Street Station. Now I'm not "expert" like you, but I'm pretty sure they weren't exactly loading up the freighters to ship out lead at Wells Street Station... :rolleyes: Pretty sure they were shipping that right to the factories in Chicago.

No you are "carefully choosing" to try to argue semantics to deflect criticism from the utter stupidity of what you said. People definitely thought a transcontinental railroad was possible at the same time that Chicago started building railways. Hell, just read the fucking wikipedia article, it says that people were dreaming of it as early as 1830 with the invention of the steam engine and that Asa Whitney was already doing surveys to develop his plan to create a transcontinental railway in 1845 (even though Whitney would not be sucessful, it indicates that you are categorically incorrect because, at a very minimum, at least one person believed it was possible enough spend tons of money surveying a route).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_T...ilroad#History

You are wrong, it's OK, you can admit it. No amount of semantic quivering is going to cover that up. In fact, 1850 was probably when people started realizing such a railroad was an inevitability as California was a state at that point.

Furthermore, the G&C Union was just arriving in ELGIN in 1850... So 1848 was the EARLIEST possible date you could use for this argument, but the railroads didn't start booming in Chicago until the 1850's at which point a transcontiental railroad was an inevitability and, duh duh duh, Chicago's civic leaders, business leaders, and railroad owners, hatched a plan to control the railways of the nation because, despite the blather you are spreading, they were just starting to build railways and, again despite the nonsense you claim, they knew they were the middle of the nation and had a unique chance to make a power grab.


Of course lines were eventually built, they just didn't get much traffic because they weren't built until after Chicago had already dominated the region's layout and built all the railyards, etc that it needed to force everyone to send their trains through Chicago. This is exactly what I am talking about. They saw an opportunity (basically a 10 year window) during which the realized they could control access to the entire interior of the country, and they jumped on it making all competing cities irrelevant.

Your confusion is understandable... even people of the time didn't quite understand what the railroad was for.

Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Spring 1980
The river was heavily industrialized, and Great Lakes vessels frequently entered the river to reach docks and warehouses further inland. The "port of Chicago" was not just at the river mouth but far, far inland. Certainly it was not at Lake Calumet, which would not become a port for another 50 years, or at Navy Pier, which would not exist for another 60.

In fact, I've heard speculation that the initial end of the line (on the west bank, actually - the bridge came later) was chosen specifically because it was easy to bring in lake-going boats with wood ties from the forests in Michigan and Wisconsin.

The transcontinental railroad was a serious possibility in 1854, when it was a huge point of contention for the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Stephen Douglas fought bitterly and won support for a Chicago-based line from Southern politicians in exchange for allowing slavery to expand into, well, the new states of Kansas and Nebraska.

As I understand it, the railroad would be financed by government-issued land grants the railroad company could sell to settlers, but settlers would not move en masse into a given territory until it achieved statehood. Therefore, statehood (and the issue of slavery) was intimately tied with the construction of a railroad.

Douglas didn't live to see it, but the final transcontinental railroad did indeed tie directly into Chicago via the Mississippi and Missouri Railroad and the Rock Island.

Such a project would have several pieces.

-a curved flyover/river bridge from the St. Charles Air Line down to Union Station
-a replacement of four crumbling South Loop overpasses on the St. Charles Air Line, with new straight bridge at Clark
-a connection in the northeast quadrant at Grand Crossing (this can be built on fill, so technically not a flyover)

plus some track replacement. If the city wants to chip in for some noise mitigation in the South Loop, that's great.

I see there's a bit of a reading comprehension problem. The Michigan Southern was a railroad, not a canal.

Sometimes it’s helpful to read a little history before you try writing about history. In this case, I recommend the little booklet 1848: Turning Point for Chicago; Turning Point for the Region, written in 1998 by Michael Conzen for an exhibit at the Newberry Library. Good near-primary sources are Yesterday and To-day: A History of the Chicago & North Western Railway System, and of course Andreas’s 1884 History of Chicago.

The Galena road (which itself never got to Galena) brought agricultural products to the tip of Lake Michigan, where they could be put on boats for shipment to Eastern and European markets. Although the passenger station was (eventually) built at Wells & Kinzie, the freight sidings came to grain elevators on Wolf Point, and to various warehouses and slips along the north bank of the river all the way out to Ogden Slip, built just for the purpose of moving freight from railroad to boat. The Illinois Central had similar facilities that dominated the south bank of the river. Chicago factories of 1848 were few and far between, mostly based on milling the wood coming by boat from Michigan and Wisconsin, not the produce coming from Downstate. Serious industry came later, for the most part, seeing the granger roads converging on Chicago as good ways to get things like farm implements out to the farm belt.

http://i44.tinypic.com/kyo2f.jpg

Palmatary's view of Chicago, 1857

You seem particularly confused about the canal competition. The Illinois & Michigan Canal ran to the southwest, toward Peoria and Alton. The Galena & Chicago Union ran to the west. The railroad that competed with the I&M Canal was the Chicago & Alton, and the Rock Island to a lesser extent. The Hennepin Canal didn’t open until 1907, by which time it was utterly irrelevant.

Just because people were dreaming of a transcontinental railroad in the 1840s doesn’t mean they had any idea where it would go. Had a southern route via St. Louis or Memphis been chosen, Chicago would have been irrelevant to transcontinental traffic.

Chicago’s railroad primacy is due almost entirely to geographic factors: being at the southernmost tip of the Great Lakes system; the rich yield of farmland in Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, and Wisconsin compared to Missouri and Arkansas; the choice of Omaha as the eastern end of the transcontinental railroad. Another geographic reason is a bit more subtle, as William Cronon writes in Nature’s Metropolis (p. 90):

A deeper reason for the city’s success was its location on the watershed between two quite different systems of corporate competition. East of the city, the railroads were known as “trunk” lines: low-cost, high-volume competitive routes following a tight corridor across the nine hundred miles to New York. West of the city, the visual metaphor of the railroad map changed from trunk to fan, with lines diverging like rays from a central point to spread hundreds of miles north and south....The intersection of trunk and fan was the essential geographical fact of Chicago’s location.... A Chicago railroad analyst put it even more succinctly: “western roads,” he declared, “were built from and eastern ones to Chicago.”

Anyone who knows the Machiavellian history of 19th century railroad titans would snicker at the idea of them conspiring with Chicago’s leaders to ensure the city’s prosperity at the expense of St. Louis, Cairo, or Memphis. So where—other than in your mind—is any sort of evidence of this “pseudo cabal of railways, business interests, and politicians” and their “plan of intentionally forcing all freight to be sorted in Chicago?”

Two problems I see. The bridge down to Union Station would have to have a pretty steep grade to get low enough to go under Roosevelt. Second, this would also leave a pretty significant bottleneck where Metra tracks into LaSalle cross the SCAL. With increased passenger service on both lines further delays could be possible.

In the Siemens-MHSRA study (pdf) suggested something like ardecila’s solution, but that assumed high-speed electric trains with better grade-climbing ability than your average diesel-powered Amtrak dinosaur. However, Siemens/MHSRA also assumed that HSR would run <i>above</i> existing SCAL and ‘L’ rather than simply taking the air line over—although the report mentions existing Amtrak and freight traffic, assuming that goes away any HSR line might still need to be elevated to eliminate conflict with the RI Line. If it’s just regular Amtrak trains running through at regular Amtrak frequencies you can probably get by with decent signaling.

Yeah, the junction with the Rock Island would need to be carefully coordinated. However, there are numerous examples of flat junctions in the Chicago area that work very well with even higher volumes than this one would have. Most notable is A-2 on the West Side where the UP-West Line crosses three other Metra lines and Amtrak. There's also Mayfair Junction where the UP-NW crosses the MD-North. It's not an insurmountable barrier, and it doesn't change the fact that commuter and intercity trains are far more compatible with each other than either is with the average American freight train.

Geometrically, I'm sure there's a way to integrate the flyover. As far as I can tell from Google Earth elevations, there's a drop of about 11' between the deck of the St. Charles Air Line bridge and the yard tracks at Roosevelt. Assuming 600' radius for a curve, that leaves another 1600' to descend the 11', which is less than a 1% grade. If a new river bridge is built south of the existing ones, that could increase the length to nearly 2100'.

There is a similar setup in Frankfurt. That, by the way, was the coolest train-into-city approach.

Hmmm, 11'. That is pretty low. I was convinced it was more of a drop. Well that certainly makes it easier. How much of the yard do you think would become inoperable because of the new curve, if any.

It seems silly to build a new approach and call it high speed or whatever and then have it intersect with the Metra tracks. Especially when the busiest times for both tracks will be around rush but there may be no other way around it. Messing around with elevation on the East side of the river is difficult because of all the roads and rails. A grade separated, passenger train only approach into Chicago would be an amazing improvement for short corridor intercity passenger trains. It would make my life so much easier.

11' is ballpark... Google's data is notoriously iffy for urban areas. Still, it wouldn't surprise me if the yard slopes gradually upwards between 18th and Roosevelt.

Grade separating this junction would be difficult. The only feasible way is to raise the Rock Island up on a flyover (if it can clear the Orange Line viaduct at 18th). You can't push anything underground because of the Red Line tunnel. Again, it's definitely preferable to an NS alignment where Amtrak trains must cross the path of freights 3 or 4 times before getting to Union Station. The Southwest Service is being shifted for exactly this reason.

BTW, the 16th St crossing apparently used to be an insane tangle of tracks in the pre-Dearborn Park days. Most of this was ripped out and simplified when they built the Red Line tunnel.
http://img26.imageshack.us/img26/3459/16thst.jpg

I for one think the St. Charles Air Line should be used as the southward extension of the Clinton subway or else some other CTA rail project. I'm glad that the CREATE Grand Crossing project puts Amtrak and HSR on the NS line, since that leaves the SCAL open for such conversion.

Heavy rail trains can climb steeper grades, so climbing over the RI line and then descending back down to the level of the SCAL bridge should be a complete non-issue.

Put a transfer station for Red Line and Rock Island metra lines near 16th & Clark. Put another transfer station for Green and Orange at 16th & Wabash (This would be instead of the Green Line station at 18th that has been bandied about.) This transfer station would involve substantial reconstruction of the el in the south loop in order to fit in all the turnouts plus a platform and still be able to reach the ramp down to the State Street subway, but it MIGHT be possible. Something like this.

I think it would make more sense for a southern extension of the Clinton subway to cross under the river and serve the future development of Riverside Park directly, rather than using the SCAL, where it's further from the heart of development and has other geometric problems:

http://i43.tinypic.com/21ou6n9.jpg

Mr. Downtown, your 16th Street station and new Orange line routing is things of beauty.

I’ve long liked the idea of a Purple Line express that through-runs with the Orange Line via the State Street subway (Orange and Purple have similar peak-period frequencies, and the RPM project has proposed lengthening the Evanston and Wilmette stations to accommodate eight-car trains). Something like this is the only way something like it could happen without merge conflicts on the El.

I like it because it's also perfectly situated should the CTA and/or City decided to push the Douglas Park branch east along 16th Street viaducts to the lakefront (not currently on the table, but I could see a day when it could be a desirable thing).

I would actually link Midway to Kimball via the State Street Subway. Cross-platform transfers at 16th and at Fullerton let you easily choose East Loop via State or West Loop via Clinton. (For you real transit geeks, the 16th Station would have both northbound tubes on the same level like Montreal's Lionel-Groulx station does).

I like that. South Siders headed to the West Loop would presumably just ride the bus an extra stop to the Red Line, so there's no need for a Green-Red transfer.

The Rock Island trains would lose most of their passengers here - Rock riders will love the one-seat connection to West Loop and River North.

Above-ground stations with that kind of cross-platform transfer are pretty rare. I can only think of Queens Plaza in NY... definitely not something you want to show to the neighborhood groups.

http://urbanomnibus.net/main/wp-cont...n-qp-south.jpg

David vs. Goliath

Well, Fullerton and Belmont both work that way, too.

Are there any plans to cover the Dan Ryan Expressway with a park?

Not that I've heard. Occasionally there's rumor that some portion of the Ike - for example in Oak Park - might get decked, and there were some proposals about decking over the portion of the Kennedy immediately west of the Loop. But I haven't heard of anything about the Dan Ryan.

Howard does too (and soon Wilson) but I was talking about the stacked arrangement you referred to. That kind of stuff is monstrous when it's above ground - certainly no worse than the existing 18th/Wentworth junction though, or your average expressway interchange.

Red Line Extension Left Off Emanuel’s Infrastructure Plans
 

http://progressillinois.com/posts/co...tructure-plans

Matthew Blake Tuesday April 3rd, 2012, 4:58pm

Red Line Extension Left Off Emanuel’s Infrastructure Plans


Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s “Building a New Chicago” speech last Thursday outlined $7.2 billion in infrastructure improvements he wants the city to tackle over the next four years. One project was conspicuous in its absence – extending the Chicago Transit Authority Red Line, from 95th Street to the end of the city at 130th Street.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s “Building a New Chicago” speech last Thursday outlined $7.2 billion in infrastructure improvements he wants the city to tackle over the next four years. One project was conspicuous in its absence – extending the Chicago Transit Authority Red Line, from 95th Street to the end of the city at 130th Street.

Since the 1960s, city planners have discussed extending the Red Line to connect the predominantly African-American and economically marginalized far South Side Chicago neighborhoods with the rest of the city’s economy. As a candidate for mayor, Emanuel said that expansion of the Red Line would be his first transportation priority.

But Emanuel spokesman Tom Alexander confirmed the Red Line extension was not part of Building a New Chicago. Alexander said the mayor only included projects where a funding source was identified.

This is arguably a fuzzy distinction. The city can identify a possible funding source for any project. But that’s not the same as said source agreeing to pay for the project.

For example, Emanuel prominently included another runway for O’Hare International Airport in his infrastructure speech. But the funding source is private airline companies, who have not agreed to pay the money.

Alexander referred subsequent questions to the Chicago Transit Authority.

Chicago Transit Authority spokeswoman Catherine Hosinski said that CTA continues to see the Red Line extension as a longer-term project. Hosinki added that the city and CTA “continues to explore multiple funding avenues to make these projects a reality.”

Advocates for extending the Red Line were discouraged by Emanuel’s infrastructure speech.

“We are becoming increasingly concerned about the mayor and CTA not properly communicating about their public investment strategies,” says John Paul Jones, an organizer at the Developing Communities Project, a faith-based group in the Roseland neighborhood.

Jones, though, holds out hope that the Infrastructure Trust Emanuel introduced at last month’s City Council meeting could mean private investors committing to the Red Line extension. Jones said that his group is scheduled to meet with the mayor’s office later this week.

However, Steve Schlickman, director of the University of Illinois at Chicago's Urban Transportation Center and former head of the Regional Transit Authority, is skeptical that the emerging trend of privatizing public infrastructure projects can work with the Red Line extension.

Schlickman says that he is not clear on how the Infrastructure Trust will exactly work. But he points out that a Red Line extension is probably unattractive to private investors. “Projects like that are very expensive upfront,” Schlickman says – reported estimates put the extension at $1.4 billion. “And there is no expectation that a Red Line transit line will have surplus operations revenue.”

Federal money would likely pay for much of a possible Red Line extension: the CTA’s Hosinski cited the federal New Starts program as a possible funding source.

But there must be matching local money for the federal government to consider the project – at least 20 percent of the project must be locally funded, and often that figure is higher, according to Schlickman. And – as noted by the mayor’s office – the city and CTA have not identified this local funding.

The mayor’s office has further constrained itself, Schlickman notes, through a commitment to no new taxes that Emanuel made in the infrastructure speech.

One local funding possibility is creating a Far South Side Tax Increment Financing, or TIF, district. Jones says that he worked with his alderman – Carrie Austin (34th) – on the creation of a TIF. A call to Austin’s office this afternoon was not returned.

The Red Line was not before pushed as a private investment opportunity, but as a way for government to better connect the city. CTA estimates that a current day trip from Altgeld Gardens public housing projects on 133rd St. to City Hall takes an hour, and involves a combination of three different buses, or two buses and a Metra line.

This whole Red Line extension needs to be rethought anyways. In its current form it does nothing to increase connectivity on the far South side other than adding four new stations. It would be far wiser imo to route it to 115th/MLK, offering a direct connection to the Metra EC/future rapid transit conversion.

Agreed.

King was considered. it was eliminated because transit ridership in the corridor was lower than in the LPA corridor and because the King corridor already has better high-capacity transit service exactly because it has Metra Electric. It would be sort of silly to duplicate that just for a transfer that might become useful sometime in the unspecified future.

If ME became the Silver Line, I'm sure a station for transfers could be arranged if it were determined to be something riders wanted.

EDIT: Unless you mean the current routing except running along 115th where it crosses with a station at MLK and then continuing southeast?

No point finding local matching funds if there's no money for grants in Washington.