strictures

I read that Caltrain on the San Francisco peninsula is electrifying.

They could also string trolley wires for electric buses on very long routes.

I something last week when I rode for the first time in months. But they have set up all the seats as pairs facing each other & one person per seat section, unless they are together.

The 4 Cottage Grove seems to have the most people trying to scam a ride. Every time I ride it to or from Downtown to 58th, there are at least two people per ride that have cards that aren't any good & about 2/3rds of the time, the driver relents & lets them ride. I've seen one driver absolutely refuse to let someone ride on an empty or expired card is the one who said to the passengers "That guy tries this almost every day!"

58th wouldn't have been an extra stop, 59th should've been eliminated! It was barely used. Jeez!

You're being absurd! Buses are for people. People go to hospitals. There's also a traffic signal at 58th. There's also a traffic signal at 57th. There aren't any entrances to buildings on 59th, until Drexel. There's nothing west of there except the Fountain of Time & hardly anyone goes to see that weird thing! You don't arbitrarily put stops at locations that no one uses & having walked there a few times to catch the X4, I was the only one boarding or alighting there. Hundreds of people a day get on & off the local at 58th, so why not let them have a faster ride on an express? And you can't transfer to the 192 at 59th, again it stops at Drexel & then at 57th, except the 57th stop is halfway down the block between 57th & 56th, due to the ambulance entrances to the garage.

There's no transfer at 59th. There's nothing at 59th! The main entrance to U of C Hospitals once were on 59th, but that was decades ago! You don't place a stop just because it's a half mile apart. You place it where people go. People go to 58th! So you put the stop were the people go & half mile spacing be damned!

I used to try to take the X4 to the UChicago Hospital. But the CTA for some incomprehensible reason, had the only stop there at 59th, not at 58th, where all the entrances are. The same problem with the X9. No stop at Polk, where the dental school & several other U of Illinois clinics are. So you walk to Ashland & inevitably, the X9 zooms past you & stops at Harrison.

If I were running Metra now, I'd be asking the railcar manufacturers to design a new version of the RDC, with a trailer car. It's obvious, passenger levels will never go back to their previous usage. Downtown businesses have learned how to have many or most of their employees work from home. The downtown office market is going to crash & the need for seven car long double deck coaches will be reduced & the even longer trains on the Burlington will go away.

That's part of the plan of that rich loon from Wisconsin, who has never ridden mass transit in his life & who has this insane idea of adding an additional Amtrak Station there, along with rerouting the Green & Orange Lines to service these buildings. Amtrak isn't on board with it & they don't want all of their trains from Union Station's South Berth having to take an unnecessary detour. I'm sure everyone who rides those lines would be thrilled to have an extra 10 minutes added to their commute for a dozen people on each run.

I believe the original plan was to have the trains use the St. Charles Airline to get to the IC Mainline, but that's 50 years ago & I was about 20 at the time I read about it. I have read that the Canadian national wants to abandon the Airline, as only two of the four tracks are in use. If the city or CTA don't use eminent domain to at least preserve the ROW, they are totally incompetent!

It was never supposed to be rebuilt. The original plan from the 1960s was that once the Dan Ryan Line was completed, the South Side Main Line was to be moved to two abandoned tracks of the IC Mainline & go to Kensington [115th] & then demolished. Why it wasn't done was probably money. But in the 1990s, with the SSML falling apart & in desperate straits running for re-election, Richie Daley, who knew as much about mass transit as Trump knows about human decency, made an unholy deal with a whole bunch of South Side black ministers that if they supported him for re-election, he would rebuild the SSML & make sure there was as much minority hiring as possible for the job. So now we are stuck with an L line in the wrong place, just blacks from the Dan Ryan line, that was rehabbed in a truly bizarre way, to go south from some stations, such as 43rd, you go to the NB platform & cross over, instead of them moving one track over to create center platforms at Indiana, 43rd, 47th, 51st, Garfield & King. Until a few years ago, when you got off at Cottage Grove, if the train pulled into the north berth & you wanted to go on a NB #4 bus, you went down the stairs & had to cross 63rd St to get to the bus stop. Finally someone realized how insane that was & moved the stop to the bottom of the stairs on the NB side of 63rd/Cottage Grove. A few people, like me, have used that way to get to the University of Chicago Medical Center. If you want to see the plans, you'll need to go to the Main Library, when it reopens & look through a few years worth of mid 1960s Chicago Daily News or Sun-Times microfilms, because I remember it on the front page of one of them & there isn't a yearly index for them, like there is for the Tribune. Unless the Tribune did run an article about it then, my father never bought it, so I rarely saw the Trib.

I've been on two moving trains when some idiot forced the doors open & jumped onto the platform from the moving train. Once was on an A train at Harrison [which was a B station then], this nut jumped out, fell down & rolled into one of the steel pillars. The second was on a NB Howard train at the old main Wilson platform. Two idiots did that & one crashed into one of the posts holding up a light fixture at the north end of the platform. I guess they survived, they were all young & really stupid!

96 should've been moved to Pratt in 1979, when Pratt between Seeley & Western was finally widened out. Lunt is just a side street that has parking banned on one side of the street!

But they did run 36 Broadway out of Limits.