Make sure everyone signs the petition: https://hsrail.salsalabs.org/chicago...ion/index.html

They created a station with two sets of facilities for commuter and intercity passengers. Turf wars. Transferring between the two is harder than it needs to be, and LIRR passengers are not really welcome to wait in Moynihan etc.

At Union Station, the Amtrak trains will likely end up split, with the LD trains loading from the traditional station and the regional corridor trains loading from the new station. Transferring from a Wolverine train to Metra will likely requiring exiting the station, walking 2-3 blocks at the surface level, then going back down into Union Station.

The Amtrak rep doing the presentation and Q & A openly admitted that he was not the best person to discuss plans for Union Station. He is the Senior Manager for State-Supported Routes.

In the Union Station Master Plan, there is a provision to install emergency exits from the repurposed mail platforms that would open up onto the plaza of the current main post office on the south side of Harrison. Perhaps they decided to allow entry as well as exiting?

He also mentions the plans are in really up in the air ATM. He mentioned possibly allowing access from Van Buren instead, or possibly from both Van Buren and Harrison.

He made no mention, one way or the other, about repurposing the steam tunnels, in Union Station's basement level, to access the mail platforms from below, as suggested in the Master Plan. Is that idea dead and buried, or could the proposed Harrison entrance lead down to the waiting area in the steam tunnels?

The renewed mail platforms will be high-level. If Metra, at some point, wishes to use the platforms and through tracks to provide RER-type services or O'Hare to McCormick service, how will they do that with the current gallery cars or the on-order Alstom Coradia cars, which are both designed for low-level platforms?

ETA - It is possible, I guess, to redesign the Coradia cars to provide a high-level entrance at the ends of the cars, which is the mid-level of the interior. Then Coradias would have to be used for RER and O'Hare-McCormick. You lose revenue seating and go to a lot of trouble and expense for a single stop, but whatever.

Metra to convert locomotives to battery power
 

https://i.imgur.com/lTLxYFJ.png

Story Link

Wow, interesting. I wonder how quiet those engines will run. The effect on air quality should also be noticeable. The cost savings on fuel alone makes this a worthy investment. Hopefully they can electrify the entire fleet quickly.

From what I recall (and please correct me if I'm wrong), when Metra took over the old interurban lines, many of those lines were originally electrified (overheard catenary wire) and then years later were converted to diesel. It seems like we are doing a 180 by going back to electric power.

This is incorrect. There were no electrified corridors other than the Illinois Central which is now Metra Electric. No other lines had overhead electrification and none of them were interurban RR lines. The SSL is still the SSL and neither the right of way of the CA&E or the North Shore Line are used by current Metra services.

I'm far more concerned about acceleration, pulling a load of 10 or 12 packed gallery cars, as well cold weather performance.

I guess I can reserve judgment until the plans are completed (hopefully Goettsch is involved so we get decent architecture). However, the way the mail platforms are situated makes it very difficult to provide a connection to the existing Union Station facilities.

And decisionmakers in Chicago don't really prioritize connections between nearby stations or different operators. They just dump you on the sidewalk with no signage and expect you to figure it out. So many missed opportunities for connections around Chicago and they neglect it every time - rail lines are apparently to be used for a one-seat ride to downtown, and nothing else matters.

I think it would be very difficult or impossible to retrofit the sub-level steam tunnels given fire codes and accessibility/ADA issues. They were never meant to handle crowds of people passing through.

There are multiple issues with a ORD-McCormick service, rolling stock is just one issue among many. Honestly the whole idea is bonkers, McCormick has a handful of events through the year and the rest of the time is totally empty. But we are somehow gonna let the needs of this huge anti-urban complex and out-of-town conventioneers dictate transit planning for the region. If they want to extend to Hyde Park or Kensington and orient CTA bus service to the express train stops, *that* would be interesting in terms of providing for the needs of actual Chicagoans.

Bet they will only run paired with diesels. This is likely to end up a waste of money that should be spent electrifying the line or at a minimum just buying SC-44s.

Any specific examples come to mind? The guy who handles interagency signage for RTA is a friend. He's managed to get lots of signage put up over the last decade, including introducing the lettered bus stops at all the downtown terminals.

Maybe this is better for the transportation forum, but with the talk of Skokie and the yellow line, has Skokie ever indicated recently whether there's still any interest/work being done in evaluating extending the yellow line to Old Orchard? Not saying it's of high importance, but in the past it was sort of under consideration. Would one of the North Side's main shopping malls and nearby Niles High School be decent enough potential ridership anchors to justify perhaps a single track extension to a terminus at Old Orchard Road (though I also recall some resistance to an extension involving the high school and its parking lots)? Maybe some opportunity for transit-oriented redevelopment of the mall parking lots along Old Orchard Road for housing that can blend into the outdoor shopping mall?

The CTA abandoned this expansion amidst strong local opposition IIRC. Unless something has changed they're not going to spend a dime going back to try again.

Extract the uniquely American phenomenon of resisting public transit connections over fears of crime from "undesirables", a go-to code word so historical it's practically baseball, it probably would have been accomplished.

There actually was a study done a few years back by Cook County on the ridership potential if the MED ran 15 minute, all day frequency from Harvey, IL to O'Hare, using Union Station. Corresponding to scenario 7 (page 34) of the study, Metra's daily ridership would grow by 23,400 riders. Extrapolate that to a full year, that would be over 7 million rides! Even if Metra only ran hourly service, there could still be immense ridership gains.

Study: https://www.cookcountyil.gov/sites/g...scms-final.pdf

Yeah the signage at least has gotten better.

So what were you thinking of when you wrote
The much-lamented Northwest Passage? An underground moving sidewalk from Millennium to Washington/Wabash?

Just cause there's now better signage doesn't mean transfers are smooth. For starters, there used to be a passage way from the Clinton Green/Pink Line station to Ogilvie but that was torn down and hasn't been rebuilt. There's still no pedestrian passage way from Clinton Blue Line to Union Station. Going from the downtown MED/SSL platforms to a CTA platform is at least a five minute walk through multiple different concourses. If you want to get to River North or Streeterville and you're taking Metra, you'll need to take an additional bus, or you gotta power through by walking or biking.

London is the only other city I can think of that has a similar problem with transferring between their suburban/regional rail service and rapid transit lines. Your tube line could have a station at Euston, King's Cross, or Paddington, and it'll still take 5 minutes traversing multiple passage ways to just barely catch your connecting train. That's not even including the out-of-station transfers which are free, but several blocks separate your connections.

Chicago's transfer situation isn't quite as dire as London's, but some short-term solutions to make it more tolerable would be to have a unified fare system to encourage transfers between transit systems and increasing bus frequencies to take riders to other parts of downtown. More mid-term solutions would include reopening the Clinton Green/Pink Line passage way to Ogilvie. Fortunately, in the webinar I posted, Amtrak has expressed interest in establishing a pedestrian connection from Union Station to Clinton Blue Line. After those projects are completed, then we can start talking about long-term/futuristic visions.

CTA Red Line extension project clears environmental review


The full story here

Link to the CTA's Red Line Extension FEIS page here

Direct link to the Red Line Extension FEIS/ROD report here

If all goes according to plan, CTA projects the opening of the Red Line Extension to occur sometime in 2029.

The Pedway still generally sucks with signage, yes (unless something's changed in the last year or two). Not easy or intuitive to go from Millennium to CTA lines. I wouldn't ask it to be a moving sidewalk.

I don't think the Northwest Passage was particularly useful except as a way to avoid street people when West Loop was a rough area, so I wouldn't bring it back. A truly useful connection would require a new concourse at Level +2 above the Ogilvie platforms, but I would love to see a special treatment of the Clinton sidewalks at grade level to emphasize the connection from the existing suburban concourse.

O'Hare's CONRAC has poor signage to get to Metra. Many neighborhood Metra stations have incredibly poor signage - damaged, vandalized, or outdated (some even refer to the legacy railroads still). CTA bus connections are poorly marked at these stations, but so is everything else.

The pedway signage was actually dramatically improved this year for getting from Millenium to the CTA stations. I'll try to remember to take a picture tomorrow...