All Talk but No Action: Chicagos RTA needs to speed up the process.

[schlimm]

I don’t want to get into this dust up, but as far as one interurban goes (the CA&E) the major contributing factor in its demise was the construction of the Congress St. Expressway (Eisenhower) that ended through service into Wells St. via the Garfield CTA line in 1953. Once that happened, ridership dropped quickly, but did not transfer primarily to cars, but to the totally parallel CNW suburban service, which was getting upgraded with diesels and the new air-conditioned gallery cars during the period, so that 3rd Rail passenger service ended in 1957.

[HarveyK400]

I used bold face to separate your remarks from my own, so your interpretation on several levels does not work also in regard to disputing the fact that if you bothered to read the traffic surveys published at the time during the abandonment hearings, automobiles did the trick as well as the Milwaukee track relocation required for same as far as the CNSM is concerned. As far as history is concerned any history of the interurban would tell you that the auto killed the interurban so it is not handy, it is history. I suggest you read Middleton’s or Hilton’s book because you are fabricating a revisionist history that anyone who has read these books or others know is patently false.Their labor costs if you are familiar with the them were extraordinarily low compared to the steam roads. Name calling in the form of foamers identify s you at least to my thinking as rather rabid on the subject resorting to name calling, which, sorry to say, bounced off. me. I agree that the electrification of Metra lines is inevitable and the longer it is put off the more expensive it will be but there’s no money to be had. If that did occur you could fairly call these interurban lines . As far as light rail is concerned, it has a place in not replacing the automobile but taking cars off the road to avoid gridlock and most of these new lines, San Diego, Dallas, Denver etc are exceeding their original traffic projections and so I don’t think Chicago would be an exception. It is a mix of transit options that work best. The I-94 corridor has been gridlocked for decades while the cost of a parallel light rail line along the CNSM right of way or the extension of the CTA line gives drivers has gone up while studies have come and gone… Oil is a dead man walking. If you think not read a newspaper.

I have read all the histories; and as scholarly as they are, I think they were incomplete and contributed to a phantasy. Gallery cars and push pul

[schlimm]

Good points, Harvey. Sticking with my example of the CA&E, its ridership did not transfer to the Eisenhower (which hurt it directly by eliminating through service), mostly switching over to the CNW. When the Kennedy/ I 90 and the Edens/ I 94 were completed, did that kill suburban services on the paralleling Milwaukee Road or CNW lines? There is pretty clear evidence that the Edens + Kennedy did kill the North Shore’s Skokie Valley line, but the CNW killed the North Shore’s Shore line because it offered faster service.