More Top Picks Best Wet Tile Saws For Home Renovations
Anyone who lives near a Metra line knows the low roar that echoes from trains in the distance, day in and day out.
A less-cacophonous future could arrive in 2028 along the Rock Island District’s Beverly Branch, where Metra plans to debut a battery-powered electric train that looks, sounds and feels unlike any of its existing trains.
“I feel like it’s going to be faster,” said Raekwon Bolling, a Metra commuter from Midlothian. “I haven’t seen it move yet. But based off of how I feel, I feel like it’s just gonna be swerving on through.”
Such was the mood Thursday when riders like Bolling marveled at the train, which sat at the LaSalle Street station in Chicago for the public to tour. No one got to see the train move, but Metra indeed expects it to accelerate and brake faster than today’s rolling stock.
Metra’s experiment with the battery-electric trains, set to be the first in the U.S., will arrive at a crucial juncture for the agency.
After the pandemic permanently transformed travel patterns, Metra has tried to inch toward becoming an all-week regional rail system rather than a weekday-focused commuter railroad. The pivot will be a big shift for an agency that still uses railcars from the 1950s and once had a reputation for stasis and patronage.
And that Metra will attempt something no other American railroad has yet demonstrated — with the battery-electric trains — shows that it’s no longer afraid to try new things, one transit expert said.
“That, to me, is a significant indicator of how they are looking at the future,” said P.S. Sriraj, who heads the Urban Transportation Center at the University of Illinois Chicago. “They’re ready to embrace emerging technologies. They’re ready to embrace new ways in which they can catalog their system performance.”
On Thursday afternoon, curious riders streamed over to look at the train, which certainly stood out from the rest of the trains lined up at LaSalle. The train has a sleek, swept-back cab for the engineer on each end, and its exterior bears a white background with green and blue stripes. There is no separate locomotive.
Walk inside, and the single-level, low-floor car has spaces for bicycles and wheelchairs, and a wheelchair lift, too. Above, screens show the next stop. The seats have charging ports nearby. They still have holders for paper tickets, the rare throwback to Metra’s existing trains.
Keep walking down the corridor, and you’ll go through a slim vestibule with doors on each end. You’re in the middle of the train, where the lithium-ion batteries are. You must keep walking to the other end of the train, since you’re not supposed to ride in the battery car.
Once deployed, the train will have two more passenger cars, making for a total of four cars plus the batteries in the middle. Metra has ordered eight of the trains, and a big question will be how far the trains can travel on a single battery charge.
“We want to see how well they work in the real world, what the real-world range is in our operating environment,” Metra spokesman Michael Gillis said. “And then from there decide whether or not it’s something we want to try to expand.”
The train has two ways to charge. The simple way is to hook the train up with an electric cable. Charging would take two and a half hours, said Sebastian Trächsel, the project manager at train manufacturer Stadler.
The other way requires more infrastructure, but it would take only 12 minutes to charge.
If Metra installs an overhead charging system at its terminals, the train can charge by raising a pantograph in order to connect to the charger. The agency plans to install the powerful chargers eventually at LaSalle Street and Blue Island, Gillis said.
Stadler will be testing the trains at its Salt Lake City facility, and at a federal facility in Colorado. After further testing by Metra, they could go into service in 2028.
The project costs $234 million, mostly from a federal grant, Gillis said. Metra has the option to buy eight more trains, the battery version of a Stadler model called FLIRT, which stands for Fast Light Innovative Regional Train.
If Metra commits to the FLIRT, the agency could test the train on other lines. Perhaps the train, which can seat only 208 riders, could run during off-peak hours. (A rush-hour Metra train can carry upward of 1,200 people.)
For the train’s debut, though, the short Beverly Branch, with its closely-spaced stops and route through residential areas, made it a good fit for the train, Gillis said.
More Top Picks Best Cat Litter Mats For Tracking
The branch is also part of a pilot program by Metra to bring Rock Island District service up to the agency’s regional rail vision. Some portions of the Rock Island District, which extends to Joliet, would get trains every 30 minutes under the initiative.
Metra also has other plans to refresh its trains. The agency plans to start receiving new bi-level coaches in 2027, which would begin to replace the current cars. It’s thinking about adding battery-powered locomotives that could pull the older cars in the place of diesel locomotives.
For now, though, riders have only gotten a look at the Stadler battery-powered train. And that seemed enough to convince the riders that they were “part of history,” said Bolling, the commuter.
The display at LaSalle Street attracted plenty of train enthusiasts, too, but some had mixed feelings about this unusual new moment in Metra’s history.
To Nicholas DeRicco, it just didn’t feel like Metra. He was wearing an Amtrak jacket and has built a model train collection. Which includes Metra trains, of course.
“Definitely very different,” DeRicco said.
“But better,” interjected another railfan, Darren Carlevato, as he walked by. “It just feels modern.”
“I can see it definitely has a new feeling to it,” DeRicco responded, sounding not entirely convinced.