With a major winter storm hitting the Chicago region today, Metra is mobilizing its crews and snow-fighting resources to ensure a safe, comfortable and reliable commute for customers throughout its six-county service area.
Current forecasts call for the storm’s greatest impact to be felt in Chicago’s south suburbs and across the border in Indiana during the evening commute. To help our customers get safely home tonight, Metra has dispatched extra crews to focus on clearing the snow at stations and rail facilities along the Metra Electric, the Rock Island, SouthWest Service and Heritage Corridor lines. Mechanical employees and trains crews working on our southernmost rail lines are also being placed on extra duty overnight and put up at hotels near our facilities to minimize any disruptions to tomorrow morning’s commute.
“Metra has made a variety of improvements that leave us well-prepared for winter’s onslaught, including more and better switch heaters and better jet blowers to clear snow,” said Metra Executive Director/CEO Don Orseno. “We’ve also taken several steps to improve communications with our customers so they can always be up-to-date with the latest information about their trains.”
As we do with other storms of this size, Metra will take a variety of additional steps throughout the storm, including:
- Dispatching Metra signal/switch maintainers to key locations and staffing those locations around the clock. The switches must remain free of snow and ice, and while all mainline switches have heaters to help keep them clear, sometimes the snow and ice falls too fast or falls from a passing train and the switches need to be cleared manually with brooms, shovels or picks.
- Dispatching about 350 workers to shovel and salt platforms and other areas that are Metra’s responsibility to clear. Clearing platforms, stations and parking lots are often the responsibility of BNSF, UP, Metra’s parking vendor or the municipality in which the station is located and those entities also are gearing up for today’s storm.
- Putting crews and equipment in place to keep our 24 rail yards clear and operational. Bottlenecks in yards can result in delays getting trains in place for timely departures. Metra uses high-powered hot-air jet blowers and cold-air blowers in the yards to clear the snow and prevent blowing and drifting. In the last two years, Metra has also installed heaters on more than 40 of our most critical yard switches.
- Leaving our engines on overnight. Locomotives don’t like the cold any more than we do. If it’s too cold we keep the engines on so they are ready when we need them.
Equipment and materials
- Metra began the winter with more than 3.1 million pounds of salt to cover the platforms and other areas under its responsibility.
- Metra has 45 snow plows at its disposal, not counting the equipment used by its parking vendor and the numerous municipalities responsible for clearing parking lots and other areas around most of its suburban stations.
- Metra has five hot-air jet blowers and three cold-air blowers to clear its largest and most critical yards. The truck-mounted cold-air blowers clear ice and snow with a 525-mph blast. Capable of traveling over roads or rails, this versatile tool can quickly clear significant amounts of snow.
Customer communications
Metra understands the importance of providing reliable, real-time communications to help our customers make decisions about their travel options during severe weather and offers a number of tools to give them access to the most up-to-date service information.
- Email alerts – Customers can sign up to receive service alerts via email for a specific rail line during the times of day that are most important to them. To sign up, visit our website and My Metra to create an account.
- Ventra App – Customers can download the app and use the Transit Tracker for information about Metra trains, Pace buses and CTA trains and buses. The free app is available in the App Store or Google Play.
- Rail-Time Tracker – Customers can visit our website and access real-time information about train status and service alerts. This information is also reflected in the Schedule Finder tool, which allows customers to generate a schedule between two stops on a line for a specific day.
- Twitter – Customers can visit www.twitter.com to follow each of Metra’s 11 rail lines or receive more general information about agency operations.
- Passenger Services – Customers can call 312.322.6777 weekdays from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. with questions about train schedules and service.
Tips for traveling on Metra during winter weather:
- Give yourself plenty of time to travel to the station and park. Expect delays. More customers are likely to use Metra trains when the weather is severe. The addition of just 10 more people on each train can increase boarding time and cause trains to fall behind schedule.
- Visit the National Weather Service website for the latest weather and storm-related information.
- Watch local television and listen to local radio stations for Metra travel and service updates.
- Use caution when walking on wet or icy station platforms.
- If you are already traveling, listen for announcements at stations and onboard trains.