[Mister Uptempo]

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.