MetraBNSF wrote:What's unusual about off-peak inbounds are heavy boardings or long dwell times at the 5 outer most stations incrementally add up and cause a train to run anywhere between 5-10 minutes behind schedule. Time is recovered at the stations where boardings and dwell times isn't as significant and when train speed is increased, usually between Berwyn and Cus.
And I'll never know why this theory isn't consistently applied to UP/W. My main gripe with the UP/W schedules is that there is little to no recovery time built in, particularly for most off-peak inbounds. The exceptions to these are the late afternoon/early evening runs 56 & 58 which get a little more padding between Oak Park & Kedzie, but otherwise, the recovery time for the other inbounds is only about 3 minutes on average. Even though this route sees only half the ridership as BNSF, those three minutes are usually already eaten up by the time it hits Elmhurst, most trains are commonly 3-5 minutes late leaving here. I just hope the pending improvements to this route will help the OTP, but somehow, I'm still a bit skeptical.
But I agree Metra should tweak the BNSF inbound off-peak schedules a bit by adding a little more time on the front end so that you won't need as much recovery time on the back end. If it's spread out a little more evenly, maybe then they won't have to publish those ridiculous 14 minute running times on some trains between Halsted and CUS...