A South Shore train rumbled along its tracks a couple blocks to the north. The Illinois border lay about three blocks to the west.
At the corner of Hanover Street and Wabash Avenue, in a north Hammond neighborhood of modest homes, a group of planners and government officials got off a bus and looked around.
This, they were told, would be the site of the Hammond Gateway station on the West Lake commuter line, a proposed South Shore Line extension that would link southern Lake County, Hammond and downtown Chicago. Riders also could transfer at the Gateway Station to South Shore trains going east toward Michigan City and South Bend.
Members of Farr Associates, a Chicago architecture and planning firm, took their first look Aug. 17, at the project they’ll be working on for the coming months, advising the project’s planners and engineers. They were on a tour of the West Lake station sites, arranged by the Northwest Indiana Regional Development Authority.
The planners’ goal is to make the new stations part of their communities’ economic development plans, not just places for riders to get on and off trains.
Doug Farr, the president of Farr Associates, was impressed with the local and state funding commitments for the West Lake project.
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“The fact that the region has figured out how to pay for it is a big deal,” he said.
As Hammond City Engineer Dean Button explained a conceptual drawing of the planned Gateway Station and the roads around it, the planners peppered him with questions about pedestrian access to the station.
Residents of the current neighborhood would have to be relocated to build the two-level station in the proposed plan, and the current South Shore station on Hohman Avenue would be closed.
Farther south, another new Hammond station would be built near the corner of 173rd Street and Lyman Avenue, on a broad strip of land former used by the Monon Railroad.
Hammond City Planner Brian Poland said some neighbors there have expressed concerns about increased traffic to and from the South Hammond Station’s parking lot.
The Monon Trail, a bicycle and pedestrian path linking Hammond and Munster, runs along the west side of the proposed West Lake tracks. Retaining the trail is a non-negotiable aspect of the plan, West Lake consultant Doug Foyle said.
In Munster, the West Lake station would be at Ridge Road and Manor Avenue, across from the Ridgewood Plaza shopping center.
The 450- to 500-space parking lot would be smaller than those at the two Hammond stations; some riders would walk to the station, the plan anticipates.
“We want a vibrant, doable, pedestrian-centric development,” Munster Town Manager Dustin Anderson told the planners.
At the southern end of the West Lake line, the plan calls for a station and a 1,650-space parking lot west of the place where Main Street, the border between Dyer and Munster, dead-ends at Sheffield Avenue/Columbia Avenue. Currently, the East Chicago station has the system’s largest parking lot with 1,200 spaces.
Main Street would be extended west, under the CSX railroad and West Lake tracks, to the parking lot on the Munster side of the border. The station would be on the east side of the West Lake tracks. Also, a layover facility for West Lake trains would be built in Dyer, just south of Main Street.
The parking lot would be more than double the size of the other West Lake lots because the Munster/Dyer station would be expected to draw riders from Dyer, Schererville, St. John and other nearby towns, Foyle said.
Dyer Town Council member Cathy Lareau said some Dyer residents worry that the station would bring additional traffic through their quiet neighborhoods, and that one broke into tears when told the plan would take his house.
Foyle said, though, that planners expect drivers going to and from the parking lot to use the main roads instead of neighborhood streets.
And, other planners said, the station’s proximity would boost the value of nearby homes.
The West Lake project’s first phase, the draft environmental impact statement, is to be finished in a few months, Foyle said, and it will be reviewed at public hearings.
Tim Zorn is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.