When the winds howl and the snow begins to pile up faster than plows can get rid of it, that’s when veterans of Chicago-area expressways know exactly what to do: they leave the car in the garage and head for the train.
But some commuters were bitterly questioning their strategy on Monday after enduring a morning rush hour that would have tried the patience of Mahatma Gandhi.
Metra, the public agency that boasts its reliable service and places signs over expressways touting its trains as “the way to really fly,” came just short of crashing and burning.
An improbable series of weather-related problems stalled scores of trains and created lengthy delays for tens of thousands of commuters–the worst Metra meltdown since the blizzards of almost two decades ago.
Metra officials scrambled to explain how this could happen in the historic heart of the nation’s railroad system, where Metra touts on-time performance of about 95 percent on most days. They blamed a range of weather-induced problems– from trees that fell across tracks to electrical outages that required crews to get out and throw switches manually.
“We have a snow emergency plan we put into effect, and I think we were as well prepared as we can be,” said G. Richard Tidwell, Metra deputy executive director.
“But when power is lost and the wind is blowing as hard as it blew (Monday), the combination makes it difficult to operate any transportation system.”
Officials put the delays at up to two hours, but some frustrated commuters gladly would have settled for that. Their unhappy railbound sojourns were even longer, they complained, after arriving at their downtown offices after noon.
The most common problem was scattered electrical outages that prevented the automatic operation of switches and signals, Metra officials said. At some spots where there are double and triple electrical feeds, all were knocked out by the weather, they reported.
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When a switch cannot be thrown in a central office with the touch of a button, a crew member aboard each train must get out, unlock the mechanism and move it manually and then climb back aboard before the train goes any farther.
“It is a slow process,” said Metra spokesman Frank Malone, in a bit of understatement.
When a signal fails, it goes automatically to red, and engineers must radio dispatchers who “speak them through” the spot to ensure safety, Malone said.
At some locations, including the approach to the Ogilvie Transportation Center, 500 W. Madison St., the flames on gas-fired heaters were snuffed out, causing switches to freeze.
“The wind was coming hard out of the north, and it blew out the heaters,” Tidwell said. “We had 20 to 30 of our people shoveling out the switches.”
Commuters aboard a Union Pacific train, scheduled to arrive downtown at 9:16 a.m. from the north suburbs, were only about 20 minutes late by the time they approached the Loop. But just south of Ohio Street, the train came to a grinding halt.
The crew announced a delay of a minute or two, but it stretched into a grueling two hours.
Passengers spent extraordinary lengths of time with their morning papers and, in some cars, passed around cellular phones so everyone could call their offices and announce they would be late.
Some passengers who topped off their coffee cups before boarding came to regret it: On-board toilets on some trains filled up.
Switch heaters also failed at a critical spot near Franklin Park, causing lengthy delays for trains on the North Central and Milwaukee West lines.
But those weren’t the only problems to vex the system.
One commuter on a Milwaukee North line train that took 2 1/2 hours to get downtown said his conductor reported that wind-driven snow was covering the lenses of signals, making them so difficult to read the engineer had to slow to 10 to 20 miles an hour.
An electrical line came down across Metra’s Rock Island tracks, causing delays for south suburban commuters heading to the Loop. Ditto for people on the North Central, where a Commonwealth Edison line down near Prairie View.
On the Milwaukee West line, some poles–“I don’t know if they were telephone poles or power line poles,” said a harried Malone–fell on the tracks on the city’s North Side. More delays.
In Lake Forest, a tree fell across the rails, slowing operations on the Milwaukee North until crews could remove it.
At a Metra grade crossing in Libertyville, a car slid into the path of a train, killing the driver and producing more delays.
And if all that were not enough, the high winds broke off gates at crossings in Niles and Morton Grove, Tidwell reported. Police officers were posted to protect the intersections and trains had to slow as they passed by.
At the Forest Glen station on the Milwaukee North, commuters tried to flag down a passing Amtrak train using the same tracks. The engineer waved and kept rolling.
An irritated Sara Hudson complained she got no information during the 90-minute delay on her commute from Lombard. And Hudson, whose train stopped about 100 yards short of the Ogilvie terminal, groused, “Why didn’t they just let us out and we could walk to work?”
Not everybody arrived at the office angry, however.
“It was funny, and I was laughing at the end,” related Mariane Conifacic, a consultant whose ride from Arlington Heights to downtown took three hours. “I was frustrated, but then all of a sudden, I realized you don’t have any control over it.”
On an average weekday, about 140,000 commuters use Metra. By the end of the day on Monday, shell-shocked officials had not yet totaled how many trains were late or exactly how many people suffered delays.
The CTA’s rail system also had problems, but not nearly as many as Metra.
A tree that was blown down across the tracks shut the Yellow Line for a while, and switching problems caused by power outages caused a temporary shutdown of the Purple Line and delays on the Red Line.
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Some delays were reported during Metra’s evening rush on Monday, but they were not nearly so severe as those in the morning. Meanwhile, officials were keeping their fingers crossed, hoping that operations would be even closer to normal on Tuesday morning.
But just to be safe, they advised commuters to tune into radio traffic reports before they head for the station.