Last year, there was northside construction of the Red Line, although the CTA had a clever trick to make this less onerous to passengers. The CTA would close one stop but allow the preceeding and proceeding stops to be open. For example, when the Thorndale stop was closed, commuters could choose walk to Bryn Mawr or Grandville to catch southbond and northbound trains. There were some stops where workers would work on the weekend, allowing northbound and southbound trains to breathlessly run during the weekday.
Fast forward today.
From what I read on today’s Red Eye, the CTA will be closing all stops from Chinatown to 95/Dan Ryan. First, why is this being done, when the paradigm the CTA used on the northside made the reconstruction less onerous to passengers? Second, what is different from the northside and the southside that makes closing station one at a time not feasible for the southside but feasible for northside? This may belong in General Questions but decided put it here since it specifically about Chicago.
Thanks.
The kind of work the CTA is performing will be completely different.
Basically, what the CTA did last year on the Red Line north of Wilson was to do work on stations. They rebuilt station platforms, tore down unused storefronts and merged them with the space allocated to stations, etc. Track work wasn’t performed in parallel with this, generally; any track work on the north Red Line recently has been of the “close down one half of the four tracks on a weekend, which requires bypassing a few stations at a time” variety and has been somewhat small in scope. The northbound slow zone between Lawrence and Argyle, for instance, persists despite my greatest wishes for its demise. And you may have noticed a new one just north of Armitage thanks to that derailment earlier this week. This is what happens when you don’t invest adequately in maintaining your infrastructure.
The Dan Ryan work, conversely, is focused on the track. The Dan Ryan tracks have faced serious issues with drainage and such (they’ve only been around since 1969; fairly sprightly compared to most CTA rail) that have significantly deteriorated conditions to the point that it’s basically one big slow zone once you get out of the subway. The CTA considered doing track work only on the weekends and such, doing things like single-tracking, but that would take years, they say. They prefer to do the whole thing all at once, saving money and time and allowing them to do some bonus stuff like putting elevators in at the stations that don’t have them. This has the not-insignificant disadvantage of seriously inconveniencing all the folks who use that section of the Red Line, but the idea is to simply get the damn thing over with. It has shades of the 1994-1996 Green Line shutdown in it, but the hope is it will be shorter and less onerous, due to the addition of express buses and such.
Stay tuned, though; if the CTA finds adequate pennies under the couch cushions, total reconstruction could be coming to a North Side near you. The embankment between Lawrence and Howard dates to the Harding administration, and, ah, is showing its age a bit. The station reconstruction we North Siders experienced last year (except my station, the bums) would be but an aperitif compared to the Gul Madred-esque (THERE. ARE. FOUR. TRACKS.) pain of reconstructing some very busy track structure. It needs to be done and I’m in favor of it, but I suspect my commute then is going to be somewhat less pleasant than it is today. Oh well, it’s a number of years out in any case.
TL;DR: Last year’s North Side work was station work; this year’s South Side work is track work, and track work is harder to do without fucking everyone’s shit up.
One other reason the north end of the track was able to be done station-by-station (the tracks at each revamped station were indeed ripped out completely, sealed underneath to mitigate the leakage into the retail spaces below, and laid anew from the bottom of the bed up), is that there are four sets of tracks all along that end, Red Line and Purple Line. So they could rip out both sets of tracks on one side while still being able to run trains in both directions, on the other side. They can’t do that on the south end since there are only two tracks.
Why they didn’t fix the North Side slowdown areas at the same time, while the tracks were already bypassed and ripped out at the stations and all they had to do was extend the work a couple hundred yards or so, I’ll never understand. It would have been so much cheaper to do it at the time than whenever in the future they’re going to do it anyway and screw with everybody again.
I’m at the Loyola stop, where they’re still doing station work and man, am I going to be happy when that’s done.
The CTA would close one stop but allow the preceeding and proceeding stops to be open.
The new stations do look great. They did an excellent job.