Quote:
Originally Posted by IrishIllini
The brown and purple lines (more so the brown line) are miserable from Armitage through Merchandise Mart. The flyover will add more trains, but the CTA should look at running 10 car trains during rush hours. It’s wall to wall from 7:30-9am. There are large crowds at Armitage and Sedgwick. It’s better in the evening, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, but it is what it is.
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The CTA can't run 10-car trains for multiple reasons. First, only some of the subway stations can berth 10-car trains. Second, not all sections of track have the power supplies to power 10-car trains yet. Third, some of the branches that could most use them lack the yard capacity to store, rally, and send out 10-car trains (Kimball Yard, I'm looking at you). For the Red Line, the RPM project will solve the power issue and possibly the station length issue. I believe Wilson is long enough now for 10-car trains, and Fullerton and Belmont, while not long enough, were engineered so that extending them is simple and requires no track changes. The North Main line stations will either be built for 10-car trains, or it will be relatively trivial to extend them. While leaves yard capacity. Howard Yard *might* be able to handle some 10-car trains, but to really do it right is what is actually driving the CTA to look to extend the Red Line to 130th. They're definitely milking it for all the political benefit possible by talking about service improvements to the South Side, but the real motivating factor is the the yard south of 95th Street is simply too small for the additional service levels needed on the North Side. When they build the new yard, they'll be able to lay up enough cars to serve longer trains, then the RPM should extend the stations on the North Side or prep them for extension anyway. I'm not sure if the Dan Ryan stations were extended for 10-cars during the rebuild in the past decade, but highway stations are easy to extend anyway.
For the Brown Line, I kinda doubt it will see 10-car trains in my lifetime as it was just extended for 8,15 years ago and the flyover will allow a few extra trains and if the Red Line went to 10-cars (far more likely), it could partially absorb Brown Line excess at Belmont and Fullerton, but if I'm wrong then I can envision one of two things happening to get it the needed yard space to support 10-car trains:
1) The CTA and City finally get serious about linking the Brown Line to the Blue Line at Montrose or Jefferson Park and find space near the Blue Line for a yard to support more trains, and then either as part of that project or as a follow-on they extend platforms (again), or
2) The CTA and City give up on linking to the Blue Line, but make a fuss about people being killed by the at-grade crossings (I've actually been on a train that killed a bicyclist) and decide to elevate the Brown Line to Kimball, creating space for a larger, elevated yard, with some lower space for maintenance accessed either through a super-elevator or an incline (or both). If they did that, they could put the yard over the existing maintenance sheds, over the current park-and-ride lot, and over the existing station, more or less doubling the capacity of the current yard and allowing space for more maintenance bays on ground level.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mark0
The Brown line through that zone is terribly overcrowded and congested. I wish there was a way to add track capacity between Fullerton and Loop. Wasnt there a plan years ago to run a bypass down Larabee or Orleans that would eventually go down Clinton to the Metra stations? That would be huge for the near north / Cabrini area. (edit) If you look at the steel bents that hold up the Brown line in that area they look like they are wide enough for 4 lines and that the outermost rail sets were removed long ago.
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South of Fullerton, there is width for four tracks because there used to be four tracks part of the way to Merchandise Mart - but not for additional Ravenswood (as the Brown Line was called) trains. The additional tracks were for the North Shore Line part of the
Chicago North Shore and Milwaukee RR, that went all the way to Milwaukee following a route basically equivalent to going from the Merchandise Mart to Howard to Skokie and then on to Milwaukee. Those trains stopped in 1963. The quad tracks went to just north of Chicago Ave, where they merged to a single set of tracks for (then) three stations - Chicago/Franklin, Grand/Franklin, and Merchandise Mart, before pulling into a terminal station just east of Wells on the north bank of the River. That service peaked at over 40,000 passengers a day, but was closer to 10,000/day just before it shuttered. For reference, the current Pink Line averages around 16,000 riders per weekday, for a much shorter route.
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