Skokie Swift/North Shore Catenary-to-Third Rail

I'm trying to get my mind around something here. The Skokie Valley Route went from catenary to third rail at East Prairie, a few miles outbound from Howard. That said,there was catenary on the Evanston line at one time and south of Howard at one time. Why not run the wire all the way to Howard on the Skokie Valley route so the changeover was made at rest rather than speed?

I think CTA upgraded the Skokie Valley wire to pantograph compatible catenary while the rest was plain trolley wire.

There was not enough overhead clearance on the Skokie Valley for catenary construction, and it was not feasible to lower the roadbed because of the water table underneath the roadbed. So there was no other alternative but to run third rail to East Prairie.

JLJ061 wrote:There was not enough overhead clearance on the Skokie Valley for catenary construction, and it was not feasible to lower the roadbed because of the water table underneath the roadbed. So there was no other alternative but to run third rail to East Prairie.

thats exactly it, we had a long discussion on the North Shore Yahoo group about skokie and pole changeover operations and whys with the MD cars and no walkways in the cars of some of them, we figger car men positioned themselves at previous stations to do the changeovers.
Evanston stayed pole, I remember riding it with CTA pole running and have film shot riding it, dodging a trackwork operation backing up, changing tracks, flopping poles around to get around it.