Quote:
Originally Posted by ardecila
Of course, if the West Loop Transportation Center is ever built, the west alcove of the Great Hall will probably be turned into an escalator bank down to the Clinton concourse, and the Great Hall itself will become a critical artery connecting Metra and conventional Amtrak with the Red Line and high-speed trains.
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I really wonder whether the HSR portion of the WLTC makes any sense at all. The diagrams that I have seen depict it as the bottom level of a 5-level cut-and-cover complex under Clinton Street. Clinton is narrow enough so that there would really only be room for
two HSR platforms. Or, at best, four - if it's arranged as a two-sided terminal station like Union Station. That just ain't enough.
To make enough space for a real station, it would have to be a great deal deeper than that to allow for a bored / mined cavern-style terminal - on the order of 150 feet underground for something like the East Side Access terminal in Manhattan. Reconfiguring Union Station to allow for more through tracks and probably a fourth approach track from the north seems, to me, like a better solution.