I’ve been in Chicago about a year now, and since I’ve got no car I’ve become a big CTA jockey, using the slow but (sort of) dependable buses and trains to get places. I’m actually a train enthusiast, and I’ve been doing a bit of research into the history of the L and CTA for a law school paper I’ve been writing.
Here’s the question: sometime between the mid-1980s and now, the L trains underwent massive structural and scheduling changes. When and why did they undergo this change? I have a book from 1983 (Destination Loop) which details the “old” structure, and a more comprehensive book (Chicago Transit, 1999) which discusses the history and current system but nothing about the big changes.
Examples of the changes: The various train lines got redesignated with “colors” (e.g. the “Red Line” and “Blue Line” and so forth) instead of the names of neighborhoods they’d travel to. Also, the trains used to come in two or three schedules: A and B trains which stopped only at alternating stations, and express trains; but now all trains besides the Purple Line Express are local and stop at every stop, even though the old A and B signs are still up in the stations. Most puzzling: what is now the “Red Line” used to come north from Dan Ryan/95th, then elevate above-ground into the loop and head west to Harlem and Lake; conversely, what is now the “Green Line” would go underground after leaving the South Side and then proceed north to Howard. Now those two lines have swapped half their route with each other.
So why and when all the big changes? Any old-time Chicagoans willing to explain?
El does mean elevated. The subway is electric, too, but nobody calls it an el. I’ve always preferred “el” rather than “L”, but for whatever reason CTA uses L on their signs, so you’ll find both in print, with L more common.
A and B trains were discontinued in 1995, when it was decided that the increased speed of travel (I think they said about 3 minutes on the Howard Line) didn’t justify the inconvenience it caused passengers. It’s worth noting that unlike New York, where several lines have local and express tracks, CTA generally has only one set of tracks in each direction, so if the A train got behind schedule, the B train was stuck behind. Off topic a bit, I always thought it was funny when the organist at Wrigley played “Take the A Train,” even though Addison was a B stop.
The Dan Ryan and Howard are both major commuter routes. The Lake and Engelwood-Jackson Park are much less busy. As a result, in 1993, the Dan Ryan was made part of the Howard Red Line, while the other lines were combined as the Green Line in order to make better use of resources. The Englewood and Jackson Park riders were understandably upset about their decreasing frequency of service from this move.
It is alleged that 1993 was also the beginning of the using the colors as line names. While this may have been when the official names “Blue Line,” etc were adopted, the maps used the present color scheme before that. Also, there was a lame marketing effort at the time of the switch, with a couple cartoon characters with old guy caps whose names represented the newly combined lines, HoDar, and L.E.Jack.
And FarmerOak and Schnitte, the trains are called “el” because they’re elevated. Someone told me to write ‘L’ isntead of ‘el’ but maybe they were wrong…
If you’re writing a history about the CTA, be sure to include the progenitors, of which there were many. You probably know the history, but in case you don’t there were various surface lines in Chgo predating the CTA. They all went belly up in the 40s and 50s and were merged into the CTA.
As a child, I once wanted to get to the Jackson Park Museum (Museum of Science and Industry or the Rosenwald) and took the Jackson Blvd. bus. I was with my older brothers and they naively (stupidly?) thought that would go to Jackson Park. The busdriver informed us that it didn’t and we’d need transfers, but the transfers were no good, since we had to transfer to a CTA vehicle and the Jackson Blvd. bus was run by a different company: the Motor Coach Company, I believe. That was the last holdout of the pre-CTA buses.
I also remember the old streetcars and then the improvement: the bus that ran on electricity, provided by overhead wires.
dqa’s wonderful post is right on the money. I have just a couple minor quibbles:
The switch was made (or at least the explanation was given) so that repairs could be made to the aging Lake and Jackson Park lines. These were indeed shut down for some time.
Also, I’m fairly certain the color names did not come into public use until after Lake/Jackson Park reopened, which would have been '95, I think.
– Beruang
Homesick former Chicagoan (and daily Ravenswood rider 1983-2001)
This is a good point which I had forgotten. The closing of the Green Line for repairs from 1994 to 1996 did roughly coincide with the switch the previous year, and having switched Englewood and Jackson Park to the less-frequent-service Green Line made the project much more efficient. Not to mention fuelling the conspiracy theorists from these neighborhoods who feared the Green Line would be permanently shut down, especially as the upgrades were delayed. However, the switch was intended as a permanent one from the start; there was never any plan to reconnect the Englewood-Jackson Park lines to Howard. This in spite of neighborhood activists, both in court and city council.
The activists were also edgy about which stations would be closed. The CTA goal was one station per mile; several stations had been at intervals of just a few blocks.
IIRC, the colored names would predate 1995 by at least 2 years. If memory serves me right, the Midway line opened around October of 1993, and the advertising campaign that preceded the opening consisted of billboards of oranges, since the Midway line is also the “Orange Line.” I remember this as it was a big deal in my neighborhood (living off the Pulaski stop) and made coming home from Northwestern my freshman year that much easier. So as far as I know, at least the Orange line has been referred to by color since the beginning.