The O’Hare Express Train Files, Part Four: The Metra Solution
An existing 33 minute Metra Union Station-O’Hare connection deserves a closer look
Upgrading the CTA Blue Line to achieve Chicago’s O’Hare express train goals would be a lot more complicated than you’d think, as we looked at in the third part of this series. There is an existing transit service that could be upgraded more efficiently, however, on a different agency entirely. It involves the best-kept secret (an unenviable title for a supposedly competitive service) of O’Hare ground transportation —Metra’s O’Hare commuter rail connection.
UPDATE (2/4/19): A Chicago Tribune article published this morning reported O’Hare to be back on top of the world’s busiest airports by flight movements. With massive future growth in the works, this only underscores the potential market for an efficient, affordable express train.
Metra’s “O’Hare Transfer” station is served on its North Central Service (NCS) line to Antioch, the second least-traveled line of the 11 it operates across northeastern Illinois. Roughly 2% of Metra’s 2016 ridership came on this line, and of those, about 2% boarded at the O’Hare station. That breaks down to a whopping 123 riders per day, as compared to over 11,000 over at the O’Hare Blue Line subway station.
O’Hare itself, meanwhile, sees over 100,000 flight boardings per day, and employs over 41,000. It’s fair to speculate that there’s a much larger market to capture here.
On paper, there’s one main reason you’d think the Metra option would be more popular: even today, trains make the run between Union Station and O’Hare Transfer in 33 minutes. That beats the Blue Line’s run time from downtown by roughly 10 minutes (on more spacious, luggage-friendly trains, no less), and is competitive with driving/taxi/rideshare even without traffic.
At $6.25 each way, it’s more expensive than the Blue Line, which charges $5 from O’Hare inbound and $2.50 from any other station towards O’Hare, but remains a fraction of the $30+ a taxi or rideshare would cost, not to mention the $40/day parking cost unless you’re willing to park remotely two miles away. Even that costs $10–17/day. Why isn’t the Metra option more popular?
Firstly, service on the NCS is quite limited. Only 9 inbound and 10 outbound trains stop by O’Hare Transfer each weekday. There’s no weekend service at all. It’s unlikely the timing works out well with your flight.
Secondly, unlike the Blue Line, which stops underneath the central parking garage and provides easy walking access to the three domestic terminals, the Metra station is over two miles away near the intersection of Mannheim Rd & Higgins Rd. Ever since O’Hare Transfer opened in 1996, riders disembarking there have still been two transfers away from the actual terminals: first, a shuttle bus to cover a measly half mile to the Remote Parking station on the O’Hare automated people mover, then a ride in on that to Terminals 1, 2, 3 and 5. Factor in that iffy double transfer, and it’s difficult to predict when you’ll actually get to the Metra station. If you miss your train, it could be hours until the next one. This could explain why more airport employees aren’t taking advantage of this as well.
In other words, the Price Insensitive, Time Intensive Business Traveler won’t risk it. The laborious transfer process destroys the time saved from the 33 minute Union Station-O’Hare Transfer segment.
The process will become easier when a people mover extension to the brand new Consolidated Rental Car Facility, which is adjacent to the Metra station, opens later this fall, despite the fact that apparently aviation officials somehow failed to make the Metra station a key component.
Connecting from Metra to the people mover will still be easier than before, but Chicago 2nd Ward alderman Brian Hopkins lamented the blatant miss on this “low-hanging fruit.” The 2nd Ward is nowhere near O’Hare, making Hopkins’ unsoliticed comment even more notable.
This leaves us with an improved terminal connection, but still far from a competitive one. Metra trains will still run way too infrequently to be useful.
Now, connect Metra to the actual terminals, improve on the 33 minute run time as much as possible, and run trains at high frequencies (every 15 minutes or less, eliminating the need to rely on a schedule), and you’ve got a very similar service to Toronto’s Union-Pearson Express. Remember, that line was made possible from an existing commuter rail line that passed just 1.5 miles away from their airport, but didn’t directly connect. What does Chicago have? An existing commuter rail line that passes 1.5 miles away from its airport, but doesn’t directly connect.
The City of Chicago has noted this potential routing. Upon announcing a request for express train proposals that resulted in Elon Musk’s company winning the bid, the city outlined three suggested routes for potential service, two of which are along the lines of this idea.
The above Route A, as we’ll call it, is almost a carbon copy of what Toronto did — it’s the exact route of the existing NCS line between Union Station’s North Concourse and just outside the airport, roughly 16 miles. Then, a new 1.5 mile spur would connect to Terminals 1, 2, and 3, perhaps in an expanded underground Blue Line station, and potentially international Terminal 5, which it would be passing anyway.
That’s not to say there wouldn’t be other significant capital expenses. The increased train traffic from the UP Express’ high frequency (every 15 minutes all day) did require expanding that existing line from two to four tracks while removing grade crossings. That was before the cost of the two mile elevated spur that connected it directly with Pearson Terminal 1.
Back in Chicago, the Metra route is at least three main tracks and mostly grade-separated already for the first eight miles, between Union Station and Galewood. However, there is extremely heavy train traffic to compete with on these tracks, from up to 138 weekday Metra trains across three lines, up to 16 Amtrak trains and somewhere around a dozen freight trains.
It’s unclear if any additional capacity is available, but running express trains every 15 minutes is a huge strain and likely too much of a burden without claiming significant amounts of adjacent residential property to build more tracks. As discussed previously in this series, these express trains need to run every 15 minutes at the very most, or they won’t be more useful than the Blue Line.
Route B, meanwhile, could more feasibly provide dedicated tracks for the Metra O’Hare express along most of its route. This route should begin at Union Station’s South Concourse, with a roughly half mile tunnel connection to the median of I-290 (Eisenhower Expressway).
The Blue Line, running west under Congress Parkway as it leaves downtown for Forest Park (this is on the other, non-O’Hare side of the Blue Line) surfaces in the median of the Eisenhower at Halsted Street in Greektown. That it has done since 1958, when the Eisenhower opened with the ‘L’ line in its median, the first median transit line in the world.
Two ‘L’ tracks are found here, as with most ‘L’ lines, but the Eisenhower’s median was actually constructed with ample width and tunnel portals at Halsted for the future addition of two more tracks, in anticipation of future demand for Blue Line express service to the West Side.
However, the rapid suburbanization of the mid-to-late 20th Century draining the West Side’s population (ironically enabled in part due to the Eisenhower itself), and the fact that expressway medians are lousy locations for rapid transit stations, saw that this demand never materialized. As such, the portals and extra median space have never been used.
They’re still available, and present prime dedicated space for an O’Hare express to run at high speeds. (For that matter, this could one day serve Midway trains into Union Station as well, if demand justified them.) The generous median would host the express until past Western Ave, where a brief jog down to Union Pacific trackage with unused adjacent right-of-way would continue until Forest Park.
A limited amount of land acquisition would be required to this point, as the right-of-way would need slight expansion in certain areas. When the route turns north thru residential River Forest on an embankment, space for only two tracks remains. However, most of the freight tracks discussed to this point are used rarely, if at all, so an outright buyout could be possible. That’s probably what the city had in mind when it recommended this route.
Continuing north, we’d meet finally meet the existing NCS line in Franklin Park about three miles south of O’Hare. This WTTW article that notes the Canadian National Railway freight tracks used by the NCS are busy already, so costs to negotiate exclusive tracks (or space to build more) could add up quickly in this stretch. The last 1.5 miles into the O’Hare terminals would need to be elevated or underground.
However, overall, Route B would provide dedicated, mostly grade-separated tracks for the express train, using primarily existing right-of-ways. If the train can establish a “cruising speed” of 90–110 mph, which is certainly feasible in the expressway median and other grade-separated segments, this line could get you between Union Station and O’Hare (and to the actual terminals this time) in about 20 minutes.
Toronto taught us that regional connectivity is important. Two possible intermediate stations could include UIC-Halsted, for a Blue Line transfer directly into the Loop (which would still be faster than taking the Blue Line itself all the way to O’Hare) and Forest Park. There, a significant amount of airport travelers from the West Side and west and south suburbs could transfer or park at Forest Park, knowing the express will zip them to O’Hare terminals from there in around 10 minutes while saving a fortune on overnight airport parking. Any more stops than that and you risk compromising travel time — these two will do.
This plan is far from perfect, would cost billions, and its feasibility may rely entirely on the willingness of Union Pacific and Canadian National to sell off its rights-of-way. Other than an easy cash grab, these railroads may have little incentive to sell, and using their leverage well could drive up land acquisition costs by the hundreds of millions.
At the same time, such freight railroad cooperation would not unprecedented in the region. The CTA Orange Line was built thru the city’s Southwest Side almost entirely adjacent to/above/in replacement of freight right-of-way in the late 1980s and early 1990s for $500 million in 1987 dollars, which translates to $1.1 billion today. At $125 million per mile of new construction, that’s a highly cost-effective figure for a heavy rail project in modern context, and it includes any land acquisition costs involved.
There’s also the fact that most of Metra’s 11 lines rely predominantly on tracks still owned by freight railroads. You’d think these landlord railroads would heavily prioritize their own trains over tenant Metra’s (just ask Amtrak and its lowsy nationwide on-time performance), but Metra achieved over 96% on-time performance in 2016. Metra’s hardly flawless, but that incredible fact is a direct by-product of a culture of cooperation with freight operators, including contracting them to actually operate some of the lines.
The NCS itself is also a testament to this cooperation. It was Chicago’s first new commuter rail line in 70 years when it opened in 1996, when most of the route was still owned by Wisconsin Central. By 2006, Canadian National had taken over, and proved willing to cooperate as well as they allowed Metra to negotiate an NCS service increase of 120% that year. Despite today’s heavy freight traffic, the NCS still ran 96% on-time in October 2018.
You get the idea — cooperation is possible. Significant investment, though, is just as imperative. The laundry list includes a handful of short new bridges and tunnels, those negotiations with freight operators, speed and safety upgrades, and modern train cars. But the framework already exists, and this opportunity to leverage it into an efficient and relatively affordable airport express train is too great to ignore.
With a transformational, $8.5 billion modernization plan in the works for O’Hare (funded entirely by airport and airline fees and federal grants, no less), and with five remarkable competing designs for its new global terminal making waves in recent local news, it’s clear now is the time to think big for America’s second-busiest airport.
If travelers could realistically get from the terminal to Union Station in 20 minutes, how much value would city officials place on that? Judging by its fervor for this topic in recent years, a whole lot.
If the City of Chicago is that serious about needing an O’Hare express train, it needn’t look further.
