I think it would make more sense to add an express Skokie service every 8-10 a minutes during rush that bypasses all the local Yellow/Red Line stops except the transfer at Howard until Belmont. Provided the line is rebuilt from Addison to Howard in the coming years the time savings should be substantial at higher speeds.

Looks like the Englewood Flyover isn't the only major rail project on the mid-south side.


http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/l...994,full.story

End of the line for a pocket of Englewood?
Survivors in a long-struggling community fight displacement by proposed railroad site expansion

By Antonio Olivo and Dahleen Glanton
September 18, 2011

In a corner of Englewood so torn apart by foreclosures that it's easy to wave to friends across vast stretches of vacant land, residents are mounting a stand against a massive construction project that could wipe out what's left of their long-struggling community.

The Norfolk Southern railroad has been buying houses and tearing them down to make room for an 84-acre freight yard that would extend a 140-acre yard just north of Garfield Boulevard. The company says the new yard is needed to meet increasing national demands for freight cargo.

...

@ctaGrayLine

You should try to write letters to congress persons (even those outside your district) in order to fund the potential Gray Line. This could be included in Stimulus 2.0. Given that the resources are already there, the only thing needed is the additional funding.

Do you know what agency would be handling this, including the logistics of having more trains used on that route?

That is one huge chunk of land.

^ Looks like equivalent to at least 2 blocks x 6 blocks. Since the entire new facility would be bisected (existing northern yard and new southern yard) by Garfield, I wonder if they would deck over that entire 2-block long stretch of Garfield, rather than relying on 2 slender viaducts at the opposite edges of that 2-block stretch. That way the yard could handle many much-longer trainsets. But interrupting Garfield, a boulevard, with a 2-block tunnel would probably be a non-starter to the city, right?

Maybe they'd reconfigure the yard so it has a single center hump at Garfield & Normal, and get rid of the other 2 viaducts.

Regardless, there's at least something positive about utilizing and revitalizing inner-city infrastructure, rather than seeing railroads just push their operations out to the 'burbs, like happened with trucking etc.

Huh? I don't think the city really cares.

A major corporation wants to build a vast new facility in one of the city's poorest neighborhoods and create hundreds of new jobs. The corporation is willing to pay fair market value for the land it requires and it is also purchasing land owned by the city.

Sounds like a good deal to me, even if the boulevard gets a little uglier. I'm more concerned about the residents being kicked out. This area is nowhere near as bombed-out as Washington Park or parts of North Lawndale.

Norfolk Southern will likely push to have to build as few through streets through this facility as possible. Garfield and probably 59th will be the only east-west streets left (they'll probably close 57th.) Not sure if that's a big problem, though.

I wonder if, along with this new yard they might leave space for a passenger bypass. Currently all the Amtrak services bound for Michigan and the east coast go through here; once the Grand Crossing CREATE project (P4) is complete, trains to St Louis, Quincy, Carbondale, and New Orleans will pass through here as well. As I recall, passenger trains frequently encounter delays due to freight congestion, and I'm sure that Norfolk Southern doesn't like holding up their freight trains on account of passenger trains either.

'SWAT team’ to give facelifts to one hundred CTA rail stations
BY FRAN SPIELMAN City Hall Reporter September 20, 2011 10:38AM

One hundred CTA rail stations are in line for a facelift — everything from painting, new lighting and power washing to new signs and landscaping — under an overhaul unveiled Tuesday by Mayor Rahm Emanuel...

...The $25 million program is to be funded, in part, through savings realized in earlier cuts to CTA bureaucracy.

http://www.suntimes.com/7766879-417/...-stations.html

^^^Also from the article:

"As he often does, the mayor said public transportation investments are key to luring businesses to Chicago."

-------------------------------------
I think is a critical distinction between Rahm and Daley. Daley lured via aesthetics and amenity "gimmicks". I never recall him claiming that PT infrastructure is critical to luring businesses.

This falls in line with recent studies that indicate that such infrastructure and things such as human capital are far more critical in luring the type of businesses Chicago should be playing for as opposed to bromide knuckle dragging "cut taxes", "cut taxes".

This strikes me as a very smart move.

I also like that Rahm is thinking small picture, quick fixes. Obviously the $8 billion to bring the system to a state of good order will never actually materialize, so it's good that CTA is finding ways to be smart.

This is part of the city's vaunted classical "emerald necklace". It's a quarter-block or half-block wide boulevard, with a massive wooded, green center median. I don't get why you think chopping out a part of that, even if for some economic benefit, would be a no-brainer. And this is not like hundreds of jobs from a factory or HQ relocation; the railyard will be 95% metal and only like 5% flesh.

On top of that, one thing that seems inconsistent is that you are worried about several dozen families being kicked out of their houses (which is a one-time change), but you don't mind thousands of neighborhood residents losing 2 blocks of greenway to a barrier at the formal entranceway to their neighborhood, which also interrupts their connection to the Washington Park/Jackson Park/Hyde Park part of the city, and which would introduce a lot of potential for crime and certainly lots of additional policing and graffiti removal (which is a permanent change). People being forced to relocate is a frequent thing in the city; paving over marquee parkland and disjointing urban fabric is not. I certainly hope that the people there receive fair value (or wishfully a small premium), though.

I think if, maybe per city pressure, disruption to Garfield can be limited to a couple narrower viaducts (splitting the railyard into northern and southern halves), then it does become more of a no-brainer.

I don't think cutting the boulevard is a no-brainer; I think it's a terrible idea.

I just don't think the city actually cares. The boulevard medians are not exactly well-used, and there's no well-formed advocacy group to help protect the parks in that area of the city. The community groups that do exist are already overburdened with massive issues of crime, poor schools, poverty, lack of retail options, transit issues, etc. If they do tackle the parks issue, it's only through the lens of health and recreation. Remember when they protested the loss of the baseball fields in Washington Park during Olympics planning? The boulevard medians are simply not a priority.

Conversely, stemming the flow of people out of the neighborhood is a HUGE issue that is front and center to the neighborhood groups. So is bringing jobs and investment to the neighborhood.

At any rate, my guess is that the Garfield Blvd crossing will be more like the 51st crossing... a series of one and two-track bridges. It certainly won't be a three-block-long tunnel like Damen at the BNSF.

They just completely cleaned up the Logan Square Blue Line and it is actually really good looking. All they did was scrape the pealing paint and rust off and then repaint everything along with a good powerwashing of every surface in the station. This revealed that the drab grey color of the brick was actually a bright cream color like cream city brick is. They also cleaned out each and every one of the lighting "nooks" in the ceilings and gave them new fixtures.

Other than a few hack-job repairs obviously from the 80's or 90's which were revealed by the power washing that ruin the aesthetic in a few places, it seems as if you are in a brand new station that could have been built yesterday. It probably cost what? A few hundred thousand most of which was labor? Totally what the city needs to be doing to each and every station.

The Division Blue line and Clark/Division Red line should be next in line! They have to be some of the dirtiest stations around. Being underground amplifies the feeling.

The boulevards always seem too suburban to me. It looks like an arterial road in any suburb. I've never seen anyone use them for anything either. Who wants to hang out in a road median? It might have been nicer back in the horse and buggy days but that's long past. I don't see their point in a car environment. Every suburb has these so called "Emerald Necklaces" it's called an arterial road. I rather they be built up more to increase density in these areas or perhaps one side could be turned into a larger park and the other side be the road. The medians are too small, noisy, and dusty to want to hang out there.

The new train yard will be built south of Garfield per the article. So I don't think it should affect it much. There is already a train over pass there.

There are basically three types of streets in the Boulevard system as far as I've seen.

1) A regular street that is just called a "Boulevard" because it connects with the system.

2) The wide, grassy median type, like Garfield is, like South Western is.

3) Real boulevards, with local lanes separated from the center lanes by a relatively narrow grassy parkway, like Randolph in the West Loop, or West Franklin Boulevard (one of the few streets names in Chicago where "Street" vs "Boulevard" and N/S vs E/W actually makes a difference), or Humbolt Blvd, Kedzie Blvd, MLK, Jr. Blvd and Logan Blvd. The most structured of these also have limited cross-streets.

4) Only center lanes, with extremely wide parkways on the side, like Marshal Blvd.

Type number 3) is, to me, the most interesting set of boulevards.

For type number 2), I've always thought it'd be a perfect place to run trolleys in the same manner as St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans. For that to work, though, there'd have to be a pretty sustained effort to increase development along the routes, otherwise there wouldn't be enough density and destination spots for ridership to rise past a point where bus service is adequate.

Regardless, I do think the city should actively encourage intensification of use along the boulevards. Sections of them are beautiful, and allowing more people to benefit from and appreciate them should be a real goal.

http://i56.tinypic.com/2dam4xg.jpg

City of Chicago Dept. of Planning Life Along the Boulevards

Here's a chart I did in the late 80s of the different boulevard cross-sections. Only a small part of the circuit (please don't call it the Emerald Necklace) has a St. Charles–type neutral ground suitable for light rail. Even more problematic is that the boulevards always forbade streetcars, so—by design—none of them are commercial strips that would be transit destinations.

Ok, that's all I was worried about.

What, too Wizard of Oz-y for you? So the unofficial name is boulevard "circuit" or something?

The Emerald Necklace refers to Olmsted's work around Boston. It's like people calling Michigan Avenue the "Miracle Mile."

Ever since I saw the Tribune story I've been thinking about innovative ways to handle the problem of having a big classification yard crossing Garfield. I think it's realistic to expect NS to want at least 20 tracks across the boulevard. Is there an innovative way we could handle that today as compared to the dark heavy concrete viaducts of the 1910s? The IC tracks through Hyde Park (12 tracks wide) had a couple of skylights but they were never really enough. Could railroad tracks be supported on a space frame? Break the crossing into three 40-foot spans and just put 12-inch I-beams directly under the rails with no ties or ballast?

That would leave no protection from debris falling to the roadway.