With Double Track growing pains behind it, South Shore prepares for West Lake addition

CHICAGO — Last year’s completion of the South Shore Line Double Track project — adding a second main line between Gary and Michigan City, Ind. — was a milestone that allowed the Northern Indiana Commuter Transportation District to significantly increase service and cut travel times.

But the launch of those massively revamped operations did not go smoothly, with NICTD President/General Manager Mike Noland writing a public letter two weeks after the start of the expanded schedule, asking riders for patience and promising improvements [see “South Shore acknowledges issues …,” Trains News Wire, May 26, 2024].

As he reviewed completion of the Double Track project, and updated other South Shore activity, for the Sandhouse Rail Group, Noland noted those improvements have come. “We’re running close to 90% on time now,” after the latest schedule revision on Feb. 18, he said. And he provided some insight into the initial problems.

“We did have teething issues, probably created by me,” he said during the meeting today (March 12, 2025) at Metra headquarters. “… When we opened up our service, we did not have 30 seconds of [schedule] recovery time. As you might know, commuter railroads build in recovery time, but I wanted to see what this railroad could do. So the first schedule we put in on May 14, we were probably running about 25% on-time performance. That’s really not a good metric in our world.”

For everyone — dispatchers, train crews, passengers — there was a learning curve, even in such basic matters as getting onto trains at station where there were now two tracks and two platforms, rather than one.

“These are 820-foot platforms,” he says. “So we’d have situations where the engineer pulled to the west end of the platform and our passenger are on the east end of the platform. Now you’re waiting for a minute and a half for people to stroll on down and get on the train. We had coordination issues with our friends at Metra; it was all new for them as well. Instead of 39 trains a day, we’re running 53 trains a day. And none of those trains were being run at the same times they were being run before. So it was all new to our dispatchers, to the Metra dispatchers, to our engineers, to our passengers … We had a whiteboard of about 20 different major issues that we tackled, and we really took a hard look and made sure that we were running like clockwork everywhere we could in August.” After the first schedule adjustment, on-time performance improved to 65%, he said.

“We’ve put in a very small amount of recovery time,” Noland said. “And so we know what the railroad can do.”

Actual construction of the Double Track project went quite well, with Noland pointing out it was done ahead of schedule and $50 million under budget. That’s for a job that included 16 miles of new second track, four new bridges, five high-speed crossovers, and new high-level boarding platforms at five stations. In Michigan City, the railroad went from street running to separated right-of-way, eliminating 20 of 33 grade crossings and adding crossing gates and lights at the others, which were not previously so equipped.

With that project completed, the focus has moved to the West Lake Corridor, an 8-mile branch between Hammond and Dyer, Ind., much of it along a former Monon Railroad line. Construction on that line began in 2020 and should be completed this summer, Noland said. “Summer is a loose term here,” he said. “You can define it any way you want.”

A key to opening will be completion of a pedestrian underpass connecting the Munster/Dyer station to its parking lot [see “Underpass work will determine …,” News Wire, Nov. 27, 2024. The pedestrian route goes under a CSX main line. The bridge work required shutting down that line for about 12 hours; that happened about a month ago. “To take a Class I’s tracks out of service, for any amount of time, takes a lot of coordination,” he said. “… It was a very well-orchestrated, very coordinated effort to pull the tracks out of service, get the jump span dropped in, and put everything back in place.”

At $943 million, the West Lake project is significantly more expensive than the Double Track. “Somebody might say, why is it $950 million,” Noland said. “There’s 16 bridges on the project. We’re up in the air for about a mile and a half through Hammond. So it’s a lot of elevated structure, a lot of civil structural work.”

Financial benefits

While the project’s first goal is to give residents in the region along the Illinois-Indiana border better access to Chicago —“jobs there pay better than in our neck of the woods,” Noland notes — it, like the Double Track project, is also expected to provide an economic boost for the communities it serves. And that’s already happening, he said.

Showing an aerial view around one of the new stations, he noted a half-dozen or more good-sized homes nearby. “All those homes were vacant land three, four years ago. Those homes are going for $800,000. So I’d like to show this to people who have questions about the viability and the safety and the attractiveness of having commuter rail in their backyard. These folks don’t seem to have an issue with it.”

And in Hammond, the city is planning, and will fund, an infill station along the West Lake line in downtown. “There’s several hundred million dollars of private-sector development that’s already committed and going, in anticipation of the fact that we’re going to have an infill station. We weren’t even going to touch it until West Lake is done, but Hammond has already got the [request for proposals] out and the plans to get it going.”

Continuing the theme, Noland noted state funding for the Double Track project was sold with a projection it would generate $600 million in private development over 30 years in long-downtrodden Michigan City.

“There’s $500 million of committed private sector investment, and we’ve been open 10 months,” he said. “There’s a $400 million project on the lake. There’s another $100 million project of vacant land next to Michigan Boulevard. … The first people in, they take the biggest risk. Once those projects are successful, then the next projects come and make it easier and easier. So I think that estimate of $600 million over 30 years is a little bit conservative.”

Future growth

While the West Lake Corridor will have traditional, catenary electrification, that may well not be the case for future South Shore expansion. And Noland says there is definite demand for such expansion.

“West Lake is a phased project,” he said. “It was originally scheduled to go not just to Munster/Dyer, but to Lowell, St. John, and Cedar Lake.” (Lowell is, in straight-line distance, about 17 miles from the Munster/Dyer station). So, West Lake, phase two. Valparaiso has asked for service, LaPorte has asked for service. There’s a potential new station in New Carlisle, Ind., especially since there’s a $10 billion GM plant and a multi-billion dollar Amazon facility.  …

“Our rolling stock in 10 years will be beyond its useful life. We know we’re going to need to convert the rolling stock, and maybe it will go to battery-electric. When we go back to those line extensions, I don’t see any reason why we would continue stringing wire. I’ve got 90 miles of charging stations, so those new extensions would be battery-electric. … We’re excited about the future of rolling stock technology.”

— Metra coverage from the Sandhouse Rail Group meeting is available here and here.