Takeoff time for CTA's Midway Line - Chicago Transit Authority - includes related article

Railway Age, June, 1993

The 115-pound running rail, for which L.B. Foster was the prime contractor, is entirely over ballasted wood ties, including three miles of elevated structures that are concrete-deck. Pandrol clips are used on the mainline and in special trackwork throughout interlockings, yard leads, loop tracks, and yard ladders, while tangent tracks within the Midway yard use conventional spike-and-plate fastenings.

At the at-grade station at the Midway terminus, a covered crosswalk with a moving walkway will give passengers direct access to and from Midway Airport. The station is also the site of the line's maintenance shop and facilities and storage yard. The 66,000 square-foot shop, again CTA-state-of-the-art, has an indoor, eight-car wash track with a full-length pit. A second pit in an adjacent part of the shop offers a two-car blowout pit and four floating jacks that will give maintenance personnel easy access for thorough inspections. These tracks are double-ended, while two others are stub-ended deuce tracks outfitted with body and track hoists and spinning posts; an outside maintenance track is equipped with a pit as well.

The shop offers just about as much maintenance as a car is likely to need, Fields says. "It's a rarity to have a car go up to the Skokie shop [where the CTA's primary, heavy-maintenance facility is located]. A car could virtually spend its entire life out here. Until it had a life-extending or a mid-life rehab or a quarterly rehab, it could spend its whole life in its home-base location." Fields says the shop is "at about 99% right now. We could open this facility and run just as well as any existing facility."

Soon, the CTA's Midway Line will be doing just that, filling in the latest much-needed piece of Chicago's transit puzzle. In fact, it really seems to complete the Chicago transit picture. "That's exactly right," says SWTP Director Larson. "It gives to the south side a completely dependable transit service to the central area and the rest of the system."

O'Hare Internatinal gets a people-mover

Midway Airport users will soon be able to take advantage of the CTA's new rapid transit line serving the airport and the Loop. Over at O'Hare International Airport, one of the busiest airline terminals in the world, travelers already benefit from CTA service, but they now have an efficient means of moving within the airport itself: a fully-automated people-mover system, which has been added to the varied modes of public transit presently serving O'Hare.

Matra Transit. Inc.. (the U.S. subsidiary of Matra Transport) says its new 2.7-mile, 13-car. 13-station VAL AGT (automated guideway transit) system at O'Hare can transport passengers between airport parking lots and terminals at speeds up to 50 mph.

The system, Matra says, effectively increases use of O'Hare's long-term parking, freeing space in the airport's main parking garage, and relieves congestion around terminals. The driverless, rubber-tired system consists of one, two, and three-car trains that Matra claims can move 2,400 passengers per hour.