I heard $21mil for construction only....I would assume design/engineering/management was on the on the order of $5-10million. The Kinzie site is much smaller with less room for staging. I think $40 mil is a reasonable estimate.

There will be 15mph slow zones in place at Damen and Irving Park for a couple months while the foundations and structural steel are repaired...same story as the other Brown Line stations. However, I believe the ties and running rail on the Ravenswood El north of Clark Junction are pretty old (~20 years), it would be a shame if that all starts getting slow zoned just as the station reconstruction is wrapping up. It would be nice to have a state capital program to move stuff like that along so we don't wind up with another O'hare Blue Line fiasco.

...Daley said, speaking from the seventh floor of the State Street Macy's, where he joined Martha Stewart for the ceremonial lighting of the store's 45-foot Christmas tree.:ahhh:

I could not find the puke smile avatar.

Hey at least he got the Frango Mints back, but only the Frango Mints and not the rest of the candy that Macy's will sell.

Oh well.

I suppose this could go under general dev too
 

http://chicagobusiness.com/cgi-bin/news.pl?id=27100

Barrington, other suburbs oppose railroad's plan
Nov. 12, 2007
By Bob Tita

Far northwest suburban towns are lining up to oppose Canadian National Railway Co.’s purchase of a lightly used rail line to relieve train traffic congestion in Chicago and close-in suburbs.

The suburban route is key to the railroad’s plan to abandon tracks along the city’s lakefront and in the South Loop, where freight trains have long been seen by Mayor Richard M. Daley and developers as an impediment to further gentrification.

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Good old commerce clause.

New vehicles? What's wrong with the buses we have? Just pull buses from the cross-Loop routes that are being replaced by the Transitway, and give them a different paint scheme.

As for stations - why are caissons or even major foundations required to build a simple platform? Obviously, several of the platforms will need stairs and elevators up to the upper streets, and the platforms will have to be separated into paid/unpaid areas - so some turnstiles and fences. In the West Loop and Streeterville portions of the route, only Curitiba-style waiting pods are needed.

Can you please explain to me why Cincinnati is able to build 4 miles of new streetcar track, overhead wire, purchase 8 streetcars, build 18 stations, a maintenance facility, and install the TSP systems on stoplights all for $88 million? How is a basic BRT line on an already-existing right-of-way more expensive than building a streetcar? Something really isn't clicking here, if the Cincinnati price is accurate.

I've never been more embarassed to live in Barrington. The traffic problems we have are a result of a poorly-planned road system, not freight trains. If CN can avoid running trains between 6-9am and 5-7pm, there will be very little impact. Everybody here is eager to point the finger at people from other towns, and at outside corporations for all of Barrington's problems.

If I had known about the meeting in advance, I would most assuredly have gone and voiced my opinion.

If you're not even getting nice new BRT vehicles (e.g. this), then why bother? Put in some paint stripes for some bus-only lanes and some signage to disallow turns at certain intersections during rush hour, glorify a few bus shelters, and call it a day with the existing 124, 125, and 157.

Stairs and platforms would require some sort of foundation work, or they would start to crack and buckle before too long. Turnstiles are very expensive, if anything you could consider leaving them out and using the honor system like most LRT systems. The vending machine installations would still run several hundred K per station.

$88 million seems to be the number thrown around by the rail activists there, a group that unfortunately have a long history of both low-balling the cost and high-balling the ridership projections for rail projects in order to get them built. Do you have a breakdown or substantiation of that cost estimate?

Also, the Carroll ROW exists, but it's hardly in shape at the moment to handle BRT traffic.

And don't forget design/management costs with any of this; 25% soft costs is a reasonable overhead burden.

Yeah, I was going to post that when I saw it in the Daily Herald this morning. The new NIMBY group is named Barrington Communities Against CN Rail Congestion

I loved the divaness of this line: "I believe that this has become our communities' worst threat ever," said Dave Nelson, Cuba Township supervisor.

What threat? I live less than a thousand feet from the Union Pacific NW line, with Metra and freight running up and down it, and it's no big deal.
I hope these McMansion nimbys get smashed hard. And of course they don't care that shutting down the freight trains clogs the roads with trucks.

AWWWWWW, HONEY......

I mean I totally agree, I can't believe we're trying to screw over the Anderson family out in Barrington just for the sake of the regions economic health and freight traffic tie-ups through an urban area of 10,000,000 people. Shame on you CN!!

maybe this has already been covered, so I apologize if it has, but won't this impact Metra's STAR Line plans? or will Metra still be able to obtain a ROW?

Well, some of us secretly hope it dooms the STAR Line plan.

There are much smarter ways to serve suburb-to-suburb commuters than to start with poorly located railroad tracks and then look for some way to use them.

oh. well. i can't say i have an answer to that, not being knowledgeable enough to rebut it but not being dismissive enough of suburban transit to agree with it.

The article also says that these suburbs don't have a PRAYER in stopping this project (thank God).

Not that I like that STAR line project, but anything that helps relieve Chicago's freight rail bottleneck is ultimately good for the local economy

Its key for the national ecconomy too. It takes a train 48 hours on average to reach the Chicago area from the west coast and takes another 48 hours to get through the bottleneck. Some frieght is rerouted through other cities, but Chicago is where the majority of trans-continential railroad routes pass through, and since we don't build new rail lines anymore and abondonded others, using what we have left to the fullest extent possibile is what is in store for the future.

I loathe these whinny suburbanites. DON"T MOVE NEXT TO RAILROAD DUMBSHITS! Has entitement really gotten this out of control, or is a bigger segment of the population just plain stupid these days?

The problem is the court system has over the years moved form a system of correcting wrongs and making parties whole to something people use to simply annoy the crap out of others and waste their money in the hopes of reaching a settlement or a payout.

Suits like this usually get dismissed fairly quickly on summary judgment, but the mere fact that they're filed raises the cost of almost everything companies do. I guess it's a matter of balancing the right to seek a court remedy with the high costs involved.

I'm sure that CN would be happy to cooperate with Barrington's construction of a grade separation to prevent traffic congestion from trains.

I was watching WGN this afternoon and their reporter said there were talks going on this morning between the big wigs at the state level, city level, and transit officials. Mayor Daley was part of the talks this morning, but then he left early, leaving some of his people there to continue in the meeting. According to the WGN reporter, he left over frustrations with the way the talks were going. He wants both a short term & long term fix and apparently the talks this morning weren't addressing both.

Why dont the douchbags who represent Illinois in congress do something at the Hill. :hell: :hell:

sorry folks low blood sugar

I haven't really spent much time on the transit thread, so maybe I'm being redundent

I read a letter to the editor today in the Suntimes, and I read the most ridiculous thing I've ever read concerning transit. The person (who lived in a far northwest suburb, I believe) proposed that the city actually just get rid of the El in the Loop. She said if we want to become a major player (like New York) we need to just cut up the el tracks and remove them. She didn't propose any kind of replacement idea, but mentioned that new york had done the same thing a couple of their downtown areas.

My initial reaction: the el tracks are one of those things that make chicago chicago. Even if she's right and the tracks suck and a more pleasing and efficient plan can be implemented, I'm willing to live with "mediocrity" because I love riding the train in the loop.

But as I thought about it more, I can't help but wonder what it'd be like if we did get rid of it and replaced with a subway that runs in a similar fashion. Once we got over the change and the ridiculously expensive cost of replacement, could chicago be a better place?

This is pretty infuriating:

Daley + Blago + Madigan + their egos + a small space = NUCLEAR MELTDOWN

It's simple physics