From Stockholm to Seoul, Beijing to Hong Kong and Oslo to London Heathrow, fast airport trains are a mark of a city that understands urgency and efficiency.
A traveler walks out of baggage claim and finds a nearby platform. A tap of the credit card and a debit of around $25-$35 and you are on board a train with ample space for your luggage and comfortable seats for your weary body. You don’t worry about departure times, because this train is leaving every 15 minutes on the quarter hour. You close your eyes for 15 or 20 minutes or so, sail past the traffic and, whoosh, you’ve been expressed downtown at a predictable time, ready for business, fun or sleep.
You can do the same in reverse. Instead of worrying about freeway traffic stressing your check-in time, you can pick your departure time (00, 15, 30 and 45 past the hour) from downtown and trust your precise moment of arrival. You get near-total predictability of your airport arrival; no need for contingencies for traffic delays.
These trains are not for everyone: most of these airports also serve cheaper (and slower) local trains better suited for airport workers on a budget or for those headed not downtown but to a neighborhood or suburb. But to say that the express trains are a desirable option for airport travelers is to understate.
For the past several months, a group of private investors has been working quietly on a $2.25 billion project — dubbed the O’Hare Flyer — for Chicago’s O’Hare that would and should transform how Chicagoans get to our big airport as soon as 2030. They’ve been keeping us informed, and enthusiastic, for 11 months. Friday, they met with us again, with a Tribune reporter in the room. Friday, the crew also showed up in the mayor’s office. And, Tuesday, they went public.
“We are a private project and we are going to be able to execute this project,” O’Hare Flyer LLC CEO Dave Lundy told us. “We have been working quietly on this for years. We wanted to be the opposite of those developers who announce a project and say they will figure it out later.” Lundy said the project will be financed by private investors, although also utilizing a capital stack that includes federal Railroad Rehabilitation and Improvement Financing loans.
Mark Walbrun, a co-founder, the chief development officer and a longtime railroad and airport engineer, explained the route to us and said that right-of-way agreements with the partnering freight railroads (including both Union Pacific and Canadian National) were close to being buttoned up.
In essence, the battery-powered train, seating up to 450 passengers, will leave Chicago’s old main post office, which will be converted into a dedicated station, and head west along existing, mostly grade-separated freight tracks and rights of way. Between Oak Park and Maywood, the train will turn to the north, again utilizing existing tracks. Only once the train arrives close to the O’Hare campus (about the last mile and a half) will the train need new trackage. Plans call for various concrete support piers to be be built, allowing this train to swing into the main terminal loop, giving access to the existing Terminals 1 and 3, along with the new global terminal, what we now know as Terminal 2. The airport express will sit astride the existing people mover, although it will operate on different rails.
Conceptually, at least, this makes a whole lot more sense than the ill-fated Elon Musk Boring Company idea to run a train from an underground station in Block 37 to the airport.
Key things about the O’Hare Flyer include the duration of the ride (15 minutes beats the pants off the Kennedy Expressway at any time of day), the clean electric trains, the private funding (no asks for public money beyond the federal construction zones), the use of existing unused or very lightly used freight tracks making things simpler and quicker (we hope), the choice of the old main post office building as the dedicated downtown terminus, the planned new, covered walkway not just from the airport train to Union Station but also including a connector between the CTA’s Blue Line and that historic depot, something the city long has needed.
This also is a chance for Chicago to one-up New York, which, despite rebuilding its airports, has no such direct train at any of the three airports controlled by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Heck, no U.S. city has a comparably speedy train (yet), although several have plans in the works. This will be a big new weapon in the arsenal of the convention and tourism agency Choose Chicago!
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We don’t see any real threat to the CTA from this train, which will serve a different market, but we do see a chance to alleviate some of the traffic on the Kennedy Expressway. And, at the same time, bring more pedestrians to the southwest edge of the Loop.
Aside from the need to take it on faith that the O’Hare Flyer has its funding as secure as they insisted to us, key things we worry about include the inevitability of the city trying to tax the ride beyond what is reasonable, unions and aldermen gumming up the construction process with their inevitable demands for a piece of that $2.25 billion, existing transportation boards getting in the way and all kinds of only-in-Chicago bureaucracy delaying a train we badly need. NIMBY forces might also start to whine, although the use of existing tracks should also alleviate that situation. And the Terminal 5 airlines might see this as a competitive disadvantage, although we’d hope they’d demur by understanding the ease of the people-mover connection to their home. And we all know the new Global Terminal should be the city’s top priority.
We’re serving notice here on aldermen that this is an express train, which means it does not stop in your ward. We can see an argument for a single suburban stop in a near west suburb, potentially allowing the train to serve communities like River Forest, Forest Park and beyond, but express should mean express. That is how these trains operate in Europe. Once the journey time increases, the value proposition diminishes and the project is less likely to succeed.
At this early juncture, the O’Hare Flyer needs a Chicago train daddy, to borrow the moniker famously given to the British transit executive Andy Byford, who now is leading the overhaul of New York’s Penn Station.
In fact, it probably will need two daddies, one sitting in City Hall now and the other taking over before the trains are running.
Let’s hope Mayor Brandon Johnson, whom we were pleased to hear was enthusiastic about the project, will appoint someone to streamline what needs to be done here, bat away the naysayers and give us a world-class train for our world-class city.
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