When I lived in the northwest suburbs of Chicago, I found it convenient to take the CTA’s elevated train to school at Loyola Rogers Park campus in the evenings after work. Most suburbanites avoid public transportation like the plague, because “that kind of people” ride the trains. But to me it was handy. It got me into Chicago, and back out, much faster than driving, and I didn’t have to deal with driving the crowded narrow streets, especially in winter. Best of all, the suburban Skokie terminal was three blocks from where I worked, and in Chicago the train stopped right in front of Loyola.
The CTA elevated train stop at Loyola is a long sweeping curved platform, a narrow one set in the middle of the tracks, so that northbound and southbound passengers all embark and disembark from the same twelve foot wide wooden catwalk suspended between electric rails. It’s so narrow that there really isn’t enough room on the platform for a southbound train and a northbound one to load or unload at the same time, so the trains stop in different spots. Northbound trains let off and pick up at the far north end of the stop, after passing by a good 2/3 of it, and southbound trains do the same on the south end. As a result, passengers waiting for a northbound train must stand back on the platform as a southbound train whizzes by, still doing 30 or 35 mph, and southbound passengers must do the same, but it’s not really all that dangerous, because you can stand there 4 inches away from the train if you’re stupid enough to do so, and to get hit by a train you’d pretty much have to jump in front of it or get pushed. And since the whole platform’s on a curve, the driver of southbound trains can see the entirety of the stop, being on the inside of the curve, but northbound drivers are rounding a blind curve, and must feel much like the driver of a car on a freeway rounding a curve defined by temporary median barriers in a construction zone at 60 mph. If there’s anything in the way around that corner, there’s no time to stop.
I rode that train to school for some number of semesters. After awhile you learn exactly where the trains are going to stop along the platform, and position yourself to be close to whatever car you want to get in. In my case, it was always a car toward the front, as those are generally the least crowded. This was always more important on the way home back north after school, when I’d be catching a train coming up from the city, which might still be crowded with late-working commuters. In order to get a front car, however, I had to make a good healthy walk along the platform after emerging onto it from street level, and then I’d lounge against a support beam, waiting for the next northbound train. I could almost see the whole platform from there, except where the tracks were hidden by the stairwells, and could see exactly where the drivers would begin to decelerate along that blind turn, and learned to recognize the sound the trains made as they came swooshing up along the platform, and how they sounded when the brakes were applied. Fall, Winter, Spring, sunshine and rain, and snow, I knew the sounds, even when the tracks were wet and the trains illuminated the night with a shower of bright white electric sparks and a sharp snap of electricity as the electric pickup shoes slid along the wet third rail.
One chilly, windy January night after class I was standing by my usual support beam watching an approaching northbound train coming up on the south end of the platform, coming to take me out of the cold and back to my warm car at the Skokie station and the drive back to my cozy, safe, comfortable suburb. The front of the train disappeared behind the stairwell from the street, still going the usual 30 or 35 mph, the driver in the blind spot of the curve, when I heard a loud “thump!” that I knew was not one of the normal sounds the train made. Suddenly it was under full brake, the locked metal wheels of the train screeching against the metal of the rails in a way that I’d never heard before.
The train came to a stop well down the platform from where it usually did, and after some moments began disembarking passengers. They weren’t really going anywhere, though. More just milling around. I walked down to the train, and arrived just in time to see the driver, an older black man, emerge from the driver’s booth and then get off the train. He was ashen. “This train is out of service”, was all he said. The front window of the train had a large set of cracks in it, as though someone had thrown a big rock at it. The passengers didn’t know what to do – this wasn’t their stop. I was at a loss myself. After some minutes a CTA employee came up from the toll booths below and informed us we would have to take the bus. So we all had to file downstairs and out the tollgates in reverse, with the solemn ticket agents handing each of us a transfer.
As we stood at the bus stop, emergency vehicles began arriving. We piled on the bus, as many as us from an eight car train as would fit on one overwhelmed bus. Those who were standing swayed with the turns, and those who were sitting scrunched into their seats to make more room in the aisles, as the bus made interminable stop after interminable stop on its regular run up Sheridan Road toward the Howard Street el station which is where the train was going in the first place.
“Wasn’t nobody got hit! Someone just throwed a rock at the train!” A small, older black man was adamant that the incident was nothing.
The neatly dressed white woman in her business suit disagreed.
“You are crazy!”, insisted the black man. “You just look in the paper tomorrow! You’re crazy!”
The buzz of the conversation continued, all the way to Howard Street. Everyone had an opinion; no one had seen anything. Not even me, who had been right there watching.
Many people complained about having to take the bus.
At Howard Street those of us continuing on other trains got back on the el platform and waited. The power had been turned off on the Howard Street north line. No trains were coming north from Loyola. Or from anywhere between downtown Chicago and Howard, for that matter. My Skokie suburban train finally arrived, and I left.
The next day in the newspaper, there was a short notice that a young woman, a freshman Loyola student, had been struck by a CTA train at the Loyola platform, and was in the hospital with severe head trauma and in a coma. Critical condition, didn’t know if she was going to live or not. No word on how she got in front of that train. They’d found her laying on the outside of the railbed, almost thrown off the the el tracks and down into the street. She’d probably have been visible from the bus stop if the light had been better.
I remember very well how the whole incident affected me. I was in shock the whole next day at work. I told the story a few times, but it didn’t seem to affect anyone else.
There wasn’t any more news about it.
A couple of years later, I was out with some of the kids from one of my classes after the last class of a semester, hanging at Hamilton’s, a Loyola bar, having some beers. The subject of the girl who’d been hit by the train just came up out of the blue. Seems the incident had been a big topic of campus conversation at the time. Rightly so, I would guess. No one knew whether it had really been a suicide attempt or what, but there’d been a lot of speculation about trouble with a boyfriend or something. All I know is I didn’t see anybody pushing anyone that night.
Some female friends of one of the guys I was with came in then, beautiful young women, full of life and future promise and lots of reason to live, and the subject of the conversation changed.
Author/Copyright: Tiger, of tigerwhip.com fame Date Written: 09/13/1994