Tadman wrote:
That said, it is maddening the way this city spends money on building temples for stations, while other stations rot and slow zones continue. This is similar to the IIT green line station and the nearby Rock Island Comiskey station. All fine and dandy until you consider: 1. the city is broke; 2. the McCormick place Metra station is a study in tetanus liability; 3. the Roosevelt station was urine-soaked tar paper since 1960; and 4. nothing runs on time on the CTA.
- The tube at IIT was paid for by IIT themselves. The deal was that IIT was putting up a new student center, and didn't want train noise to interfere with whatever activities were going on in the structure below (I've been in the building in question - the 100+ year old "L" pillars are visible within the interior spaces).
- I very strongly suspect that aside from the track itself, the McCormick place station is completely under the jurisdiction of McCormick's owners, the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority. Any improvements done to this station would be conducted by the MPEA, and the MPEA is broke.
Can't argue with you about Roosevelt though. In the grand scale of things, I think Metra's management really made some mistakes back in the late 80s/early 90s when transit funding wasn't so hard to get. While the CTA was busy building the Orange line, rebuilding the green, extending Blue to O'hare and making little optimizations to improve service and cut costs (elimination of conductors and re-routing the two big mainlines to the current Red/Green lines), Metra gave us the NCS and that's about it. Metra's management at that time were basically all ex-Class 1 guys and ran the system like they'd run a class 1, given that the checks from taxpayers weren't being threatened and seemed to be consistent in their delivery. Metra management was especially cozy with the C&NW people and it wasn't uncommon for catered employee specials (using Metra equipment) to make trips on all three UP lines under the guise of inspecting track conditions (when a track geometry car would work just fine). Meanwhile the wooden stations on the Electric continued to rot.