CNW Bi-levs for sale

These recently turned up at DF Barnhardt, and I suspect they are in storage at EJ&E's Joliet shops. I saw some sitting around there a few years ago.

http://www.trains-trams-trolleys.com/home/coaches.htm

That's this fleet:

http://www.cl.ais.net/~dbehr/

The owner tried to convince Skokie, Morton Grove, and Northbrook IL to run an extension of the Skokie Swift on the former C&NW Valley sub before it was ripped out, just so he could keep the wheels rolling on these things and stick them somewhere, but the communities were hostile and the idea died when the rails came out. He was certainly friendly enough when I contacted him.

SlowFreight wrote:The owner tried to convince Skokie, Morton Grove, and Northbrook IL to run an extension of the Skokie Swift on the former C&NW Valley sub before it was ripped out, just so he could keep the wheels rolling on these things and stick them somewhere, but the communities were hostile and the idea died when the rails came out. He was certainly friendly enough when I contacted him.

And now, another installment of "Railroads removing capacity that could still be of use today..."

This route would be ideal for "reverse" commuters living in Chicago with jobs located within this corridor, since it provides more direct access to retail and employment centers than the nearby Metra lines to the east and west. As such, it would definitely have taken a little more traffic off the Edens; it's a shame this idea never really took hold. But if you really wanted to be creative, the entire route could've been restored as a UP/N branch, since the trackage once extended all the way south to Mayfair crossing on UP/NW's Harvard sub, and the remnants of this branch's southern end is now referred to as the Weber industrial lead. I think there's still at least one active customer in the immediate vicinity of the crossing, but the former single track branch has been abandoned north of Foster or so.

Theoretically, outbound UP/N trains from OTC could travel via the NW line, then diverge north at Mayfair. Traveling through Skokie and Morton Grove, it would then join UP's Milwaukee sub (ex-CNW New Line) at Valley Jct. in Northbrook, before diverging east at KO Jct to access the Kenosha sub in Lake Bluff. Would likely be used for peak direction traffic only, with, say, 4 or 5 express trains in each direction daily; and it would result in quicker commute times to/from downtown for passengers above Lake Bluff.

Consequently, removing these trains from the regular Kenosha sub route also would free up a little capacity for enhanced express service south of Lake Bluff, which definitely would come in handy now, in the wake of the recently expanded service. But for commuters along the southern portion of the Skokie Valley corridor, I guess they'll just have to keep on waiting for CTA's Yellow line extension to Old Orchard, which has been on the drawing board for about the last 30 years, give or take a generation...

Coming from a guy that did the Edens or Kennedy reverse commute about once every week for two years, IT SUCKS. I lived around Armitage and North, and for trips out the Kennedy I'd take North Avenue and use Manheim or 83 to acces Elk Grove Village or Franklin Park. However, when headed up the Edens there is really no good alternative - 41 turns into a city street after somewhere like Foster or Howard.


Good thinkin, guys! Tearing up track in north-suburban chicago is really the way to go...


And for those interested in an aerial view, find the EJ&E yard at Joliet in Google Maps - Satellite view - at lower left is about ten of these cars being stored.

Has the land the track was on actually been sold, or is it still UP's property? Having seen what it looked like on railfan visits to the Skokie CTA station, I doubt it would have been feasible in its condition (at the time) to run commuter trains on it. The track itself, while not in bad shape, wasn't welded rail and was for all intents and purposes just a "branch line" for the UP. I don't know what the top speed of a Metra train on that track could have been, but the CTA trains would probably be going faster. As long as the land is kept under some governing body's control, that's all that matters. Should the RTA want to run commuter service up and down there at some point, they'd have to put in new trackage anyway.

I always thought a law that abandoned ROW's become railbanked property of the state/city/authority, etc... would be a wise idea to make it easier to re-activate one day. There's a definite argument that railbanking is in the public interest, even though NIMBY's and bozos will tell you otherwise.

Because the Valley Sub largely travelled on former North Shore property and because Samuel Insull's main empire was electric utilities, the ROW is safe from development. It's still in use as a high-voltage power line corridor. My guess would be that ownership reverted to ComEd.

The mile or so between what was most recently the end of the Valley sub and where it used to join the Weber Spur was intact last I looked on Google Earth, including the overpasses.

Unfortunately, the Weber Spur no longer has any active customers north of Mayfair Junction as of last year, so it probably won't be around much longer either. The true value of this line would have been for its connection to the Skokie Shops, but CTA in its infinite wisdom has been shipping all of its L cars via truck since the Weber line was cut back in 1987 (to Devon?).

Oh. Yeah. Speaking of topics, I should mention that the guy with the bilevels told me that he thought the real reason he met so much resistance to connecting with CTA was that one of the city managers was convinced it would "bring crime." He tried to argue that if you have to make a cross-platform transfer in Skokie that folks aren't going to stand on the platform with their stolen TV sets waiting for the CTA. But just like Marietta, GA, the fearmongers triumph over mobility....