The O’Hare Express Train Files, Part One: The Batcave
A look at Chicago’s most exclusive underground hangout, and why it exists
This is the first of a multi-part series on the myriad of proposals to connect Downtown Chicago and O’Hare International Airport via express train, and it covers the infamous mid-2000s Block 37 fiasco.
There has been no lack of ostentatious pronouncement from Chicago’s last two mayors on the sexy prospect of an express train from downtown to O’Hare International Airport. How exactly that would be achieved has never been fully clear, despite both mayors moving forward with unsolidified plans.
London’s Heathrow Express, completed in 1998, is a frequently referenced model. The dynamically priced, privately operated service whisks travelers from Heathrow, the world’s seventh-busiest airport, to Paddington Station in 16 minutes, compared to 35–60+ minutes by taxi.
Meanwhile O’Hare, which narrowly remains even busier than Heathrow, has been connected to downtown via the Blue Line ‘L’ since 1984. The Blue Line zips along the median of the Kennedy Expressway before dipping thru dense neighborhoods both underground and elevated, with many stops. While a crucial link in the city’s transit system which also serves dozens of other communities along the way, there’s no mistaking it with the Heathrow Express. A ridehailing service from O’Hare to downtown would take anywhere between 25–60+ minutes, while that Blue Line trip takes 40–45.
It is certainly important to note that the current Blue Line airport-downtown connection actually compares quite favorably to its American peers, which has won it its fair share of allies in the discussion. This is in no small part aided by the Kennedy Expressway’s typically astonishing level of congestion, which on many weekdays seems to present an all-day rush hour and the same, if not worse, conditions in the reverse commute direction.
Thus, the mayoral calls for “true” express service. Proposals over the years have ranged from upgraded ‘L’ routes and trains, to upgraded Metra commuter rail service, to new technology entirely, such as Elon Musk’s underground “electric skate” vehicles.
Some of these plans could have value. Others, completely outlandish. In this series we’ll take a look at what’s been on the table, and today, that’ll be a deep dive into the most infamous of them all — the Block 37 plan.
If a publicly-funded express train plan were going to move forward, surely Chicago taxpayers would have ample time to weigh in (especially considering the glacial pace of most public infrastructure projects) before watching their hard-earned dollars put shovels in the ground, right? Well, not in this case.
If you were a mid-2000s Chicago taxpayer, you’ve actually already paid for $200 million worth of one. That went towards an enormous, eerie dark basement constructed under the Block 37 shopping center in the Loop.
It is, of course, closed to the public and all existing entrances are concealed. But in the existing lower level of the shopping center, a busy corridor that connects the Red and Blue Line subways, you can see where a major entrance to the terminal was planned to be — a hollow wall across from the Au Bon Pain. The false wall is covered primarily by an Amazon Locker.
The trains themselves? You can’t ride them. They don’t exist. But to further explore this ill-fated path of the mid-2000s Chicago taxpayer’s dollar, you can read this fascinating account from one of the few Chicagoans to ever have entered the Batcave, as Crain’s columnist Greg Hinz called it. “I’m not supposed to say how you access the space — security concerns, you know —,” Hinz wrote, “but let’s just say that a variety of elevators, locked doors and ladders are involved.” (Hinz actually preferred “Moria” from The Lord of the Rings, but I’m sticking with Batcave.)
This Block 37 “superstation” plan was to be an innovative public-private partnership in both infrastructure and service, according to the CTA’s 2006 project business plan.
The project, originally developed by Joseph Freed & Associates, was to finally place a shopping center on a long vacant square plot of land in the Loop (one of the only remaining), with express CTA service to both airports in the basement below. The transit portion, which also included a lower level transfer corridor between the Red and Blue Lines integrated into the mall, was to be partially funded by the developer.
Service was to be contracted out to a private operator as well. “Premium fare single market services are not CTA’s traditional business,” the study reads. “Therefore, it is recommended that CTA tap into the existing domestic and international market of transportation service providers to enlist the private sector to manage both the initial Direct Service and the ultimate Express Service.” These “Direct” and “Express” services are both somewhat optimistic terms — more on that in a second.
The study strongly weighs market segmentation, and realizes that the “price insensitive business traveler” is the vital market they’d need to reach for this to be successful. The trains were to be run with refurbished cars from the existing ‘L’ fleet, which would include luggage space, 2 x 1 seating, flight info screens, and presumably other luxury amenities. “The service provider should consider offering flight check-in and baggage tagging,” reads the study. It emphasizes partnerships with airlines, downtown hotels, and the city’s tourism and convention bureaus as “crucial”.
Schematically, rail access to both airports (this plan also included service to Midway International Airport, currently served by the Orange Line ‘L’, from the same Block 37 station) worked because of the site’s location, nestled between the State St (Red) and Dearborn St (Blue) subways. The Block 37 Batcave station is situated diagonally between the southeast at Washington/State and northwest at Randolph/Dearborn.
This lines up the platforms ideally, theoretically, for sending trains towards both airports using existing ‘L’ trackage. O’Hare trains would join the Blue Line just before Clark/Lake, while Midway trains would join the Red at Washington and switch to the Orange Line via a little-used connector between the subway and elevated just south of Roosevelt, at State/13th.
This could even have been used to run special convention trains nonstop from Block 37 to Cermak-McCormick Place on the Green Line, an infill station opened in 2015 with a goal of getting thousands of McCormick’s 3 million annual visitors on trains.
Sound promising? Perhaps enough finagling could have gotten this to a workable plan, but this proposal was doomed nearly from the start, and there are a few reasons why.
A quick glance through that business plan reveals that time was of the essence: “CTA’s [2005] agreement with The Mills Corporation stipulates that CTA must provide airport service when the 108 N. State Street station opens in 2008. The Express Service would not be ready in time for the opening; however, a Direct Service can be initiated by that time.” Mills was Block 37’s original developer, before the aforementioned Joseph Freed & Associates took over for the financially-struggling Mills. I’m unsure if it was that change, or some other, that nullified the 2008 airport service requirement, but it became a moot point in 2009 when Freed & Associates itself ran out of money.
That “Direct Service” that was contractually mandated to run by 2008? That meant opening the new station and running trains to the airports, with extremely few, if any, other upgrades completed. The trains, whether skipping stations or not, would be stuck behind standard Blue or Red and Orange Line trains the entire route, which the business plan admits to.
The CTA was moving extremely quickly to try to keep up with the development of Block 37, even knowing that their shiny new “airport express” service would be anything but that on opening day. The report also mentions that it seemed unlikely their private operator would even be able to refurbish all of the 30 cars needed to run the service in time. But to make sure the opportunity wasn’t missed, the proposal sailed through City Council with a general expectation that the kinks would be worked out.
Say you wanted to try this new-fangled “Direct Service” upon opening in 2008. The previous paragraph means that, initially, you’d have been boarding regular, unimproved CTA ‘L’ cars at the Block 37 station, leaving once every 15 minutes (normal Blue Line trains leave downtown towards O’Hare every 2–9 minutes throughout the vast majority of an average weekday), taking the same route and travel time as normal Blue Line trains (roughly 45 minutes). But instead of having paid $1.75 for it on the Blue Line, you’d have paid between $12–17, as per the study’s recommended pricing structure
It wouldn’t have been a great look, nor would it have been useful. Certainly not to the ever-elusive “price-insensitive business traveler”, whose most valuable commodity is time. This service would have, amazingly, increased door-to-door travel time over the Blue Line, due to the lower frequency. But again, the CTA was frenzied to keep up with the development, a fact the business plan literally uses as a rationale for opening such a service:
“Rolling out the Direct Service at this time primarily allows CTA to comply with its contractual obligation, but also begins to establish a market for the service and familiarizes residents and visitors with the downtown station and transit as an improved option for airport trips.”
Either that, or initial users would feel ripped off and local pundits would denounce it as a waste of taxpayer money. Talk about digging yourself a PR hole.
But not to fear — improvements were to be made.
The “Express Service” mentioned by the study called for capital improvement along the routes. For the Midway trains, this meant one passing track at the Western/49th station. Orange Line trains could wait at the platform for an airport express to pass. For the O’Hare trains, this meant either passing tracks at the Damen and California stations, or an entirely new route from current Blue Line tracks near Milwaukee/Elston up to the Kennedy Expressway/Union Pacific tracks. That route would stay fully separated from the Blue Line until near Foster Ave, where it would rejoin it in the median of the Kennedy.
The three passing tracks would have meant complete reconstruction of those three stations, while the partial new O’Hare route would have cost an estimated $1.5B in 2006 dollars. Given inflation of infrastructure capital project costs in the last couple decades, it’s likely to have cost significantly more than that. But the only other option was just the passing tracks, which would’ve allowed your express train to pass, at most, one (Midway) or two (O’Hare) local trains along the way, being stuck behind any others for minimal travel time savings.
Forget the amenities and fancy terminals—drastic time savings is what would make that pricing model exponentially more elastic. Complete lack thereof, and it’s a failure.
The hasty action taken for this plan, despite its alarming question marks, alerted some skeptics. The Chicago Reader’s Ben Joravsky panned the proposal in 2005. CTA’s own Chairman at the time, Carole Brown, wrote in October 2006, “I should note that I’m not at all interested in non-express ‘direct’ service absent a viable plan to do real express service.”
However, she did see value in connecting the Red and Blue Line subways, noting “there are significant operational and security benefits to connecting the subways….in emergencies, a subway connection will give us the flexibility to maintain and restore service to more of our customers.” Making that connection is still very much possible and relatively easy, considering the vast majority of the trackbeds have already been dug out, although there is no political momentum currently to complete it.
The CTA’s scrambling to take advantage of a rare and uniquely useful private partnership opportunity is understandable, but the failure of this to come together also saved themselves from a logistical nightmare. Joravsky’s column notes that there was no additional capital funding for express tracks, and using existing tracks would have had significant adverse effects on CTA’s other lines. In 2018, peak-direction service on the Red Line and O’Hare branch of the Blue Line are at 100% of track capacity during rush hours.
In fact, adding capacity on the O’Hare line, specifically between the Loop and Logan Square, is perhaps the CTA’s most pressing infrastructure need today. An ongoing capital project is doing just that right now, but adding small, limited capacity airport express trains would have exacerbated the issue much earlier. Future construction of dedicated express tracks to serve the Block 37 terminal could have been and still is possible, but is unlikely to say the least.
The Block 37 proposal had incredibly unique advantages going for it, such as the nearly perfect terminal location and private sector involvement, that forced the city’s hand when pressed with a closing window of opportunity. What ultimately doomed it, however, was the sheer absence of a clear plan to achieve its value proposition: time savings.
To city officials, heavily leveraging existing ‘L’ infrastructure may have initially seemed the perfect link to the city’s transportation network, and infinitely more cost efficient than starting something from scratch. What they came to realize, even if tangentially more so than directly, was that with this infrastructure carried capacity constraints that would make it nearly impossible to meet that value proposition, even if a few passing tracks or other upgrades could be thrown in.
Without easily workable ideas that wouldn’t involve just building new, prohibitively expensive tunnels from scratch anyway, the Block 37 plan was mothballed indefinitely in 2008. In the long run, that was probably for the better.
Wouldn’t it have been great if more ‘L’ lines had been built with express tracks to allow for such a service? In the case of the O’Hare-bound Blue Line along Milwaukee Ave, an express track was once on the docket. Stay tuned for more.
