TRAINS Magazine
New signals at Chicago's Brighton Park junction to be cut in this weekend
CHICAGO
July 3, 2007
Brighton Park junction, also known as Panhandle Crossing for a Pennsylvania Railroad predecessor, will finally emerge from the era of manually controlled signals this weekend when remotely controlled signals are cut in. One result of the cutover is a required detour for Amtrak trains.
The famous junction, northwest of the intersection of Western Avenue and
Archer Avenue in Chicago's Brighton Park neighborhood, is a major crossing
point, hosting trains of four Class I freight railroads, plus Amtrak's
Chicago-St. Louis trains and Metra's Heritage Corridor commuter trains.
North-south parallel lines of CSX and Norfolk Southern cross Canadian
National's former Illinois Central (earlier, the Gulf, Mobile & Ohio), on
which the passenger trains operate. BNSF trains run through the crossing on
trackage rights.
It is one of the few major junctions in the U.S., and likely the busiest -
it sees about 80 trains a day - where trains are directed by a switch tender
and manually operated semaphore-style signals that he or she controls. All
trains are required to stop at the junction before proceeding. This weekend,
that will change as the semaphores will come down and the junction will be
controlled remotely by Norfolk Southern dispatchers at Ashland Avenue Yard,
nearby to the southeast. When cleared through the crossings, trains no
longer will have to stop before proceeding.
During the weekend, Amtrak trains through Brighton Park - all Lincoln
Service trains, plus the Texas Eagle (Metra's service here runs only on
weekdays) - will detour between Chicago and Joliet, Ill., via Metra's Rock
Island District, the former Rock Island main line. Using southbounds as the
example, this will be accomplished by making like the City of New Orleans,
Illini, and Saluki by backing out of Chicago Union Station on the BNSF to
Union Avenue. From there, they will proceed forward on the St. Charles Air
Line to 16th Street, where a staffed interlocking tower still controls the
crossing of the Rock Island and a southwest quadrant connection allows
direct access southbound onto the Metra line. In the southern extremes of
Chicago, the detouring Amtrak trains will keep to the Rock Island District's
main line, normally used by only a few weekday rush-hour Metra trains,
rather than the suburban line. At Joliet, the Amtrak detours will use
Metra's connection track to the Heritage Corridor route (today Union
Pacific, ex-GM&O) to the south; they will then back up into Joliet Union
Depot for their station stop. Northbound trains will do the same, in reverse
sequence, of course. The Metra connection track is used every weekday by
Heritage Service trains, which lay over in the Rock Island District's Joliet
storage yard.
Amtrak and Metra were able to "practice" this detour on June 16-17 when Belt
Railway of Chicago was doing signaling upgrades at the Lemoyne and Nerska
junctions in Chicago, where BRC's main line crosses the CN (Amtrak/Heritage)
and BNSF Transcon main lines, closing the BNSF and CN for portions of that
weekend.
--Dorian--