NICTD proceeding with ‘very aggressive’ infrastructure plan

The number of riders on South Shore Line trains hasn’t approached pre-pandemic levels, and isn’t expected to in the coming year.

But the railroad is proceeding with a “very aggressive” plan to improve the railroad’s infrastructure over the next six years, South Shore Line President Michael Noland told the railroad’s managing board Monday.

The railroad’s best estimate is that its ridership this year will increase over last year’s levels, Noland told the Northern Indiana Commuter Transportation District board. But downtown Chicago offices aren’t as full of workers as they were more than three years ago, before the COVID-19 pandemic, and the railroad’s Double Track construction project has disrupted service between Michigan City and Gary in the past year.

“It’s not the same type of seamless service that we provided before,” Noland said, noting that a rider from South Bend has to get off the train in Michigan City, ride a bus to the Gary Metro station, then get on a train again for the trip to downtown Chicago.

Projecting future passenger numbers isn’t as easy as it was before the pandemic, Noland said, but the railroad is monitoring the numbers and tracking trends in downtown Chicago employment and commercial real estate.

He noted that discretionary, or non-rush hour, ridership — people going to Chicago for entertainment, shopping, or medical appointments — has approached previous levels faster than rush-hour ridership.

The South Shore Line’s major projects are proceeding on schedule, Noland said.

Double Track, which started in Michigan City, is just over 50% complete. Most of the work in the coming year will be between the Dune Park station and Miller, with the project’s “substantial completion” expected in November and regular train service in May 2024. The cost now is $373 million.

The West Lake Corridor project between north Hammond and the Munster-Dyer border is about 15 to 20% complete, with substantial completion expected in the fall of 2024 and full service in May 2025. The projected cost is $568 million.

Along with those major projects, the South Shore Line is continuing an extensive rehabilitation project on the rail cars it bought some 40 years ago and has begun preliminary engineering work for a project to move the South Bend station to the west side of the South Bend airport.

It also plans to make a “significant investment” of $150 million to $170 million, Noland said, in helping the Chicago-area Metra service improve the tracks that the South Shore Line uses in Chicago. That work includes building another set of tracks into the downtown Chicago stations to handle the increased number of South Shore Line trains when the West Lake project is completed.

The South Shore Line also would like Metra to improve the signaling system so trains could run faster on the tracks between Kensington and downtown Chicago.