Last week, the CTA's Red and Purple Modernization team and the organizers of the upcoming 2025 Transport Chicago conference hosted a tour of Phase One of the the 'L' corridor rehab. Overhauled stations in Uptown and Edgewater are slated to re-open this summer. Transport Chicago, taking place on Friday, June 13, bills itself as "providing a forum for the exchange of knowledge in transportation, research, policy, and practice."
The tour met at Belmont Station in Lakeview, which serves the Red, Brown, and Purple lines. There, Grace Ohs, RPM Vice President discussed the $320 million Belmont Flyover, officially known as the Red/Purple Bypass, which was the first segment of RPM work. The structure, which debuted in November 2021, provides grade separation at the location where the Brown Line crosses the Red and Purple lines. As a result trains no longer have to wait to let each other pass.
While the flyover has been in use for three and a half years, Ohs said the project still isn't fully complete yet. Rather it's in stage three, but nearly done. After opening the bypass, the CTA rebuilt the track underneath. She said there's still a little signal work to do at Addison Street, but after that, the project will finally be wrapped up.
Tour participant Christine Uzzo said she enjoyed hearing details about the flyover. "The first time I rode it, I just thought it was cool, like how high up you get, and it's just exciting to see such big projects," she said. "It's easy to focus on the negatives of what's really old about CTA, or what could be improved. But there are also big improvements happening and to make trains go faster."
From there, we rode the Red Line to the under-construction Argyle stop, exiting at the temporary station a block north of Argyle Street at Winona Avenue. During a visit to the RPM community office nearby at 5137 N. Broadway, CTA community liaison Jeff Wilson said it's been challenging to get people to understand that the $2.1 billion project will ultimately be worth the associated construction headaches.
"All the communication and all the outreach in the world, while important, really doesn't change someone's perspective of how you're doing this," he said. "And that's probably one of the biggest lessons that we've learned walking away from RPM, is you can explain to somebody 10 million times what we're trying to do and accomplish and how it's going to impact them, and until they actually see it outside their back door, they don't care."
The final part of the tour was a sneak peek inside the under-construction Bryn Maw station, but unfortunately we we were asked not to take photos. While inside, those on the tour got to check out some of the parts of the station that normally wouldn't be accessible to the public, like the customer assistant's booth.
There was a mosaic on the wall, with some red and white tile IIRC, and one of the attendees asked if all the stations were going to have similar components. "The art varies by the artist's medium, but a lot of them do have an elevator cladding and a mosaic," said one of the tour guides. "We’re also reinstalling some of the art that was in the old stations. We will reinstall some of the historic plasters outside of the stations and some of the artwork outside of the stations which had been done not that long ago."
In addition, we learned some interesting things about how rules about land use have affected the project. "CTA also has a lot of restrictions on what we can use our land for, particularly when it's purchased with federal funds," said CTA Senior Manager of Strategic Planning Quinn Kasal. "So in the case of this project, federal funding has supported this project, there are a lot of restrictions over what that land can be converted to... There could be more potential power given to CTA in the future. So that's something that we're keeping an eye on."
"I thought [the tour] was great," said a participant named Sam. "I really enjoyed getting an inside scoop on what the CTA is cooking up with the track work, particularly, and some of the intricacies of dealing with very confined space, kind of all these different moving parts together. I thought it's very impressive the level of logistical support and coordination that was maintained throughout the process."
Transport Chicago 2025 is next Friday, June 13, from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m at the voco Chicago Downtown Hotel, 350 W. Wolf Point Pl. Register here.
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