Fullerton & Belmont Stations Design Question
 

(According to the "official" design featured on the CTA's website) The renderings of the underside entrances of both the Fullerton and Belmont stations show tapered columns, presumably of buffed concrete yet the Ross Barney site shows them being a rather banal utilitarian round column. Has anyone seen more accurate renderings? Does anyone have any inside info? Were the more stylistic columns nixed when the original bids came in so high?

I've been curious about this for awhile.

^ Crains Jan 24th article was posted on page 30 of this thread, and its Jan 27th one on page 31.

Don't worry, those bases have been covered

You really need to know what you are talking about.

The Craines January 29, 2007 addition has the CRAINES EDITORIAL verses the story from the week before. Crains is doing a follow thru....and it is impressive.
http://wilsnodgrass.smugmug.com/photos/127055575-L.jpg

http://wilsnodgrass.smugmug.com/photos/127055578-L.jpg

^

The hell....that picture looks like a metra train ran into a van and now there's fire raging around the bottom of the locomotive

^ Yeah, that's no "minor" conflagration

Another fucking derailment? This is becoming pathetic.

Glad to see Create moving along, despite the slap in the face from our former Republican led congress.

Once we got to Howard on the red line at 4pm, we were told that no purple or yellow trains were running and we would have to take the shuttle busses. Some of us (but not all) had been warned before we got on the red line. However, the bus drivers lined up outside the station didn't know what routes they were running and displayed false route numbers on their marquees. It took maybe three CTA attendents fifteen minutes to coordinate the drivers - in which time a bus packed full of people who had been told they were Evanston-bound had to trade busses with a bus that was full of people going to Skokie - and they were extremely rude, shouting angrily at the customers who didn't know where to go.

The way the CTA handled this simple coordination of two shuttle routes makes me shudder to think what would happen on a citywide scale during a natural disaster or terrorist attack.

http://www.suntimes.com/news/politic...aley03.article

Games are impetus for transit line: Daley

February 3, 2007
BY FRAN SPIELMAN City Hall Reporter
Mayor Daley said Friday he views the 2016 Summer Olympic Games as the "impetus" to build the north-south mass transit line Chicago has desperately needed since his father's dream of a Crosstown Expressway died.
Chicago is stuck with a downtown-centric transit system where the Loop is the hub, the spokes go out to the suburbs and there's nothing west and southwest of Ashland Avenue, the mayor said.


CTA Circle Line
If Chicago wins the Olympic sweepstakes, federal funding will be pouring in to cover the cost of security and transportation. And that provides a unique opportunity to correct a historic mistake, he said.
"A lot of people were against the Crosstown, but [killing it] was the worst thing that ever happened to this city," Daley told the Sun-Times editorial board.

"You talk about the Olympics because that's the way you can do things.... The Olympics will give us an impetus [to build] public transportation we don't have. Get on the Dan Ryan and look at how many people are driving north. ... We need a north and south line. ... We're going to propose that anyway, but we think it helps us if we get the Olympics."

Daley made it clear that the mass transit system he's talking about is "completely different" from the proposed CTA Circle Line, which would create an outer ring that connects all elevated train and Metra lines in the city.

The precise route has not been determined. But the mayor appeared to be describing the so-called Mid City Line his administration has been studying for the past five years as a possible Crosstown replacement.

^^ Has anyone heard anything about a mid-city line? How far west would it go? Is it supposed to be part of the CTA? A rail line running up and down western has long been a wish of mine, but if the circle line is going to run on ashland anyways, perhaps they should push the mid-city line further out. What would be another good north south arterial street to put this on?
Kedzie seems like it is dense enough to benefit greatly from this.

You'll find a map on the far right column of this page
http://www.chicago-l.org/plans/2010plan.html

Wow, that would really be something if we had 2 circumferential lines(circle and midcity) connecting up all the el and commuter lines. Hopefully it would spur TOD in many west side communities in dire need of infrastructure improvements. I hate to start thinking too wishfully about this stuff when we have so many problems maintaining the current infrastructure, but I think these two lines would give chicago a transit system that would compare to the best systems in the world (provided the trains stay on the tracks).

It was announced at the Central Area Plan lecture, that the Green Line will be getting a stop at Morgan Street very soon. TIF money is being used to finnance engeering for the station design. Construction could start as soon as 2008.

Also, a major part of the plan is creating another subway under Larabee and Clinton Streets. It would break off the Red Line at North and Clyborn, head south to link up with Ogilvie and Union Stations, head south to the St. Charles Airway, east over the river and then south to link up with the Red Line at ~18th Street.

Yup, in terms of transit projects, the City is currently pursuing:
1) River Line BRT/LRT
2) West Loop subway/Trasportation Center
3) Mid-city line along the Crosstown ROW from Montrose/Kennedy southward
4) green line infills stops, probably one at Morgan, one at ~18th or Cermak, and one at either Damen or Western (i.e. as many as 3, eventually)
5) downtown subway station rehabs (Jackson/Dearborn currently underway, Grand/State is next, and I think Clark/Division after that.... I wish they'd pick up the pace)
6) Reconstruction of State/Lake L station, and construction of new Washington/Wabash station to replace Madison/Wabash and Randolph/Wabash.

CTA is pursuing:
1) Circle Line
2) Red, Orange, and Yellow extensions
3) Ogden BRT/LRT, but I think this might be about dead at this point
4) Some other cool stuff I can't tell you publicly....yet. But you guys will like it. Some stuff that will hopefully be authorized in the next big transportation bill in 2008 or 2009.

And theres Airport Express, which is unclear whether it's a city project or a CTA project, and hence the quasi-mess surrounding it at the moment.

The CTA stuff will generally take longer to execute than the city stuff because CTA is going through the federal new starts process, whereas the city would be looking to pay for it's projects through TIF and property tax revenues.

Hot damn, these are great ideas. I didn't realize that the "second Loop / Clinton superstation" had been revised to include a whole new line!

Now, how would this work with the routes? Would there be two types of Red Lines, one on the existing track and another on the new track, and a third "circulator train" that simply went around and around the new underground loop, to interface with the Blue? Or, is there an even better idea?

I thought that part of the idea was always to have the Cermak train become the "underground looping" train, but since this is now the pink line, this seems out of the question.

Connections and more stations are really what hurts Chicago's system from being a truly usable system for daily activity, and I am just thrilled that the various agencies are apparently aligning to make some of these improvements happen. :tup: :tup:

That's news to me. Has the CAP been updated recently? Because I distinctly remember that the red line extension from North and Clybourn south to the West Loop was one of a couple possibilities (not a definite), and I read nothing about extending that line southward and across the river. That's great news as it'll free up the current red line alignment for circle line trains (once that phase is completed).

I mentioned earlier in this post how important that last subway link is for the future of downtown development. A new larger underground loop would effectively be created that would not only allow for more capacity, but more systemwide operational flexibility. I also hope they have airport express service in the new WLTC in addition to Block 37. It would be very convenient to have your choice of two places to go to for quick rides to the airports.

Oddly enough, I'd also like to see Metra offer express service to O'hare, but I'm not sure how feasible that is considering it would require tunneling under existing infrastructure just to build a branch from the current NCS line over to the central terminal area. The more cost-effective solution there would be to simply extend the ATS from its current endpoint in the middle of the long-term parking lot to the Metra station itself. They're expanding the NCS line anyway for the purpose of providing the same service levels as the other major Metra lines.

Another killer idea. More interconnectivity opens up so many intriguing options... for instance, with the Mid-City tracks, it would finally be possible to run convenient transit between both airports.

Metra to Ohare would be awesome. I love the Green Line stops..I would prefer 18th to Cermak though.

The Metra to O'Hare would be a great idea and I have thought so for a long time. Just stick some DMU's like the STAR line is planning to use and I bet it could be done rather easily (along with extending the O'Hare ATS). The thing is i bet city hall would not want any competition with the CTA x-press in which it has a lot riding on. Not to mention I would bet that the Metra line could get to O'Hare just as fast or faster then the X-Press on a smoother ride then the refurbished CTA cars/blue line can provide which wouldn't bode well for maximising the CTA x-press prospects. You guys know way more then I do about this stuff though so maybe I am off base and it could be explained to me.

I am trying to think of another city that has two express lines to the airport. Does London have two express trains to Heathrow?

.....Another off topic thought. Has there even been serious discussion about joining the brown line up with the blue line at either Jefferson Park or Montrose? The two are so agonizingly close and open up for so many faster access to O'Hare and the NW side that I have hard time thinking it hasn't been explored.

I've heard numbers of around $20-50 mil to extend the O'hare people mover to the NCS station. This would probably be a more cost-effective option for Airport trains from Union Station then adding additional Airport Express infrastructure, since the Clinton/Larrabee subway as proposed would cross under the current Milwaukee subway so there probably wouldn't be a track connection. This sort of frequent service would also be contingent on upgrading the junction on the west side where the Milwaukee District lines (which the NCS runs on) cross the UP-W lines, but I understand that design is underway or maybe even complete and some funds have been located for this key upgrade which is part of CREATE.

You also brought up something interesting that has mostly been absent from the public discussion on the Circle Line: There is simply not enough capacity on the State street subway for Red Line + Airport Express (Midway) + Circle Line trains. The Circle line only works if it includes routing Howard-Dan Ryan trains through what was heretofor "Phase 4" of the project, the West Loop subway, which is basically the alignment Shawn described.

Part of the problem is that all of these are pipe dreams, totalling billions in infrastructure costs. Without the political muscle to appropriate funds, these will never happen. The outlook isn't great, but there's some reason for hope: the new congress, which features prominent Illinois and Chicago pols (Emmanuel, Obama, Durbin), and Daley, who's starting to show signs of taking the transportation infrastructure seriously in conjunciton with the Olympic bid.

All I can say is that I doubt we've heard the last of this concept.

VivaL, pardon my ignorance, but wouldn't this preclude the possibility of this track serving as the future leg of a second undergound Loop that includes existing Blue Line subway? Or would there be new track added above this "West Side Subway" tunnel to achieve the above?