Category: Beyond Chicago

Illinois Railway Museum keeps 100-year-old Chicago transit trains running

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This train, Chicago Aurora and Elgin 409 & 431, ran on the interurban line from Chicago to Wheaton, with splits to Elgin and Aurora (thus the name). You can see its extensive route map. Many of the suburbs it traveled to and through now have Metra service and other parts became the Illinois Prairie Path. 

Every year at the Illinois Railway Museum in Union, Illinois, volunteers bring out the working condition trains that used to operate on Chicago or Chicagoland tracks: ‘L’ trains, interurbans, and streetcars. This past weekend was “Chicago Day” at IRM. My friend and I rented a Zipcar and drove there, 54 miles from my house in Avondale. According to the article on Wikipedia about IRM, it’s the largest railroad museum in North America.

The museum is a not-for-profit education corporation run completely by volunteers. It’s funded by memberships, donations (both monetary and services, like train car transporting), grants (including from the State of Illinois), entry ticket sales, and sales in the gift shop and of vintage paraphernalia.  Continue reading Illinois Railway Museum keeps 100-year-old Chicago transit trains running

Savage ride: a trans-Chicago bike trek with Nelson Algren scholar Bill Savage

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Bill Savage at the McKinley Park lagoon.

[This piece also appeared in Checkerboard City, John’s weekly transportation column in Newcity magazine, which hits the streets in print on Wednesday evenings.]

“Nelson Algren wrote, ‘It isn’t hard to love a town for its greater and its lesser towers, its pleasant parks or its flashing ballet,’” says Algren scholar Bill Savage, strapping on his bicycle helmet. “‘But you never truly love it until you can love its alleys too.’ So there’s this dynamic in the city between the boulevard and the alley, between the beautiful urban spaces and the place where the garbage and the rats are, and if you really love Chicago you’ve got to love both.”

An English lecturer at Northwestern University, Bill grew up in Rogers Park with his brother, sex advice columnist Dan Savage, and still lives in the neighborhood. “I tell my students, it’s very easy to experience the city secondhand, in books and movies and online,” Bill says. “But if you’re not out there on the pavement, whether on foot or on a bicycle or in a car or on public transportation, you’re missing something.”

Continue reading Savage ride: a trans-Chicago bike trek with Nelson Algren scholar Bill Savage

Grid Shots: People on the platform

Since we don’t have a schedule of Grid Shots themes to go on, I looked at the latest photos people have added to our Flickr group. This one caught my eye and prompted today’s topic: people on the platform.

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Photo by Mike Travis, who captioned the photo with, “Don’t look at me, Kid. The answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything is right in front of you!” Continue reading Grid Shots: People on the platform

Bike sharing in Toronto: a preview for Chicago’s program

On a recent visit to Toronto, I decided to try Bixi bike sharing as a way of exploring the city, getting a taste of the Toronto cycling experience and trying bike sharing, in anticipation of Chicago’s planned launch of a similar system.

Each day, my ride was waiting outside my door.

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York station, at York and Queens Quay West.

When I entered my code on the dock keypad, the yellow light flashed, then the green light was accompanied by a bike bell sound.

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Members insert their key fob. Lights indicate the bike’s unlocking/locking status. 

The Bixi bike is a sturdy utilitarian model, comparable to a Dutch city bike. Its heavy steel frame and fat tires absorb a good amount of vibration and shock. Its front basket has a built-in bungee cord to keep things in place.  A hub dynamo powers LED blinky headlights on the front of the basket and tail lights on the rear stays.  They worked quite reliably when the bikes were moving, but I found myself wishing that the tail lights were a little brighter.  I supplemented mine with an additional red blinky that I brought from home. Continue reading Bike sharing in Toronto: a preview for Chicago’s program

Grid Shots: Community gardens

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The @ward1bike #Twitterbike at a garden. Photo by John Lankford. 

After some debating with John Lankford about this, I gave in to create the Grid Shots theme of “community gardens”. He sent me the first photo to feature (above). The bottom line, that won me over, was that a lot of people bike to their community gardens. I’ve even biked to a community garden myself, with Brandon Gobel and Jana Kinsman, to deliver beehives.  Continue reading Grid Shots: Community gardens

Green Lane Project to accelerate better bike lane development across the country

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Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) director Victor Mendez speaks to the audience with Bikes Belong president Tim Blumenthal. Photo by David Schalliol. 

A soirée and a press conference in Chicago two weeks ago (May 30-31), bookended the launch of the Green Line Project, an initiative of the Bikes Belong Foundation and its six grant cities. The Green Lane Project is a sharing and technical assistance effort to build “better” bike lanes, to “propagate them faster across the country”, as Martha Roskowski, project manager, put it.

What is a Green Lane? From the project website, “A Green Lane is a statement about how we experience our communities,” but from an infrastructure sense, a green lane is a European-style bike lane “adapted to meet the unique needs of American streets”.

Continue reading Green Lane Project to accelerate better bike lane development across the country