In September 2022, the Department of Buildings issued a permit for the construction of a 33-story apartment building at 350 N. Canal St. This past May, the new tower welcomed its first tenants.
But when the city signed off on the new building, it inadvertently foreclosed on the possibility of a critically needed regional transportation asset: 350 N. Canal blocks a potential connection of the former Chicago & North Western Railway’s tracks serving the Ogilvie Transportation Center with the Amtrak main line that brings trains from north of the city into Amtrak’s Chicago Union Station.
Wait. How can the Ogilvie tracks be connected to the Union Station tracks? Aren’t the Ogilvie tracks elevated above street level, and don’t they pass directly over the at-grade Union Station tracks just before entering the 16-track terminal at Madison and Canal streets?
Correct. But before the North Western’s elevated depot opened in 1911, its tracks ran at ground level just east of the new elevated tracks. Those original tracks weren’t removed (and they still connect with the elevated main line via a ramp near Elston Avenue and Augusta Boulevard). The legacy tracks terminate at the T-intersection of Kinzie and Canal streets. Rusty rails in the shadow of the 1911 elevation are still visible.
If that original alignment were reactivated and new rails and signals installed, and if 350 N. Canal had not been built, those tracks could have been extended less than 200 yards south to join the Union Station tracks where they cross Canal. In fact, if 350 N. Canal had been designed like its spectacular neighbor at 444 W. Lake St., with its ground floor one story above grade, the connecting railroad tracks could have passed right under its elevated lobby. With the connection in place, some of Metra’s Union Pacific North Line trains from Kenosha, Waukegan, the North Shore and Evanston — and some of its Northwest Line trains from Harvard, Crystal Lake, Barrington and Arlington Heights — could have been routed into Union Station. Metra-UP passengers would be able to transfer directly to Amtrak trains, or to Metra’s Burlington Northern, Southwest Service and Heritage trains to the southwest suburbs.
Why was 350 N. Canal allowed to go up in the path of this potentially vital rail connection?
Part of the answer seems to be our siloed bureaucracy. The Department of Buildings is not a transportation planning agency. All it does is make sure the proposed new project meets all the construction, safety and zoning codes. Despite its name, the Chicago Department of Transportation does not deal with the entire transportation spectrum. It mainly takes care of the streets. The Illinois Department of Transportation basically builds highways, has only a tiny passenger rail bureaucracy and does not monitor the impact of local, private-sector construction on potential rail connections.
And our regional master planner, the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, simply did not have in mind a potential Union Pacific-Amtrak connection at Canal and Kinzie. CMAP maintains a large inventory of existing, former and potential transportation assets, including abandoned and disused railroad tracks, but a Canal-Kinzie connection was not on it.
“Nobody had expressed a desire to have some of the Metra UP North and Northwest trains access Union Station,” a CMAP official said. “We do maintain an inventory of former rail lines. Some are hiking trails, some are bikeways, some are under consideration for being restored as commuter rail lines in the future. But Canal and Kinzie was not on our radar.”
Editorial: R.I.P., Metra’s commuter rail. Long live regional rail!
The problem, the official said, was a classic chicken-or-egg reasoning failure known as problem-solution myopia: “We didn’t have a Canal-Kinzie connection in our inventory of potential projects because nobody realized it was there,” he said. “And nobody realized it was there because nobody had been looking for that connection.”
If CMAP does decide to contemplate a Union Pacific-Union Station hookup, there may just be one opportunity left to make it happen. The Union Pacific still uses one of the old ground-level tracks to deliver tank cars of corn syrup to the east side of the Blommer Chocolate Co. factory at Kinzie and Des Plaines streets. Blommer has announced it will soon close that facility and sell the property for demolition and redevelopment. IDOT, CMAP, CDOT, Metra, Amtrak and UP need to sit down and study whether the Blommer tracks that now stub on the north side of Kinzie can be extended across Kinzie into the one block of Jefferson Street between Kinzie and the Amtrak main line. At the south end of that block, the track could be curved eastward to join the Amtrak alignment into Union Station.
The fit would be tight. The owners of the 365 N. Jefferson St. apartment tower would not enjoy the street in front of their building being turned into railroad tracks. The building would have to be reconfigured with a new front entrance. And the Echelon Chicago apartment tower on Des Plaines would have to be provided with a new entrance to its parking garage, now accessed from the Jefferson side.
But the space is there, and Chicago is very creative at squeezing lots of transportation into a small footprint. Look at Midway Airport, the “L” in the Loop or the Jane Byrne Interchange. But as the CMAP official said, you won’t go looking for a solution until you realize you have a problem, and you won’t admit you have a problem until you suspect it might have a solution.
And Metra definitely has a problem: a lack of connectivity.
In downtown Chicago, Metra’s 11 lines terminate at four stations, and in the suburbs, its lines meet only at two points: downtown Blue Island, where Metra Electric terminates a block away from the Rock Island station, and at Prairie Crossing near Grayslake, where the North Central Line crosses the Milwaukee North Line. Neither meeting point has coordinated schedules, and the North Central service offers only seven daily round trips and no weekend service.
Metra will never be able to compete successfully with car travel until its routes connect the way our highways do. A Union Pacific-Union Station connection would be a good place to start.
F.K. Plous is a transportation writer and a former employee of the Chicago & North Western Railway.
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