CHICAGO — Commuter rail operator Metra will offer free rides on the weekend of June 8-9, concluding a week of activities to mark its 40th anniversary.
The agency dates its birth from June 8, 1984, when the first meeting was held of the Regional Transportation Authority’s Commuter Rail Division. The Metra name was adopted a year later to unify the various parts that formed the area’s commuter rail system.
“Whether you have been riding Metra for 40 years or took your first ride today, we want to thank you,” Metra CEO/Executive Director Jim Derwinski said in a press release. “And as we look to the past and celebrate four decades of serving the Chicago area’s transportation needs, we are also looking to the future and making plans to continue that service for many more decades.”
Anniversary-week plans include include social-media events encouraging riders to share memories of riding the system, photos with travel buddies, and 1980s trivia, as well as Customer Appreciation Day on Tuesday, June 4, when gifts including coupons from local businesses will be handed out at downtown stations, while supplies last.
The commuter operator has also created a “museum in a railcar” that will visit downtown stations this summer, and plans other 40th anniversary events and activities later this year.
The striped noses are to make the locomotives as highly visible as possible to any trespassers along the ROW and to motorists at grade crossings of which there a many of the latter in Chicagoland.
As we each recall, BN had similar stripes but discontinued with their later locomotive orders pre-merger.
Anyway, as to the topic itself, one more reason (among many others) to ride METRA.
Is Metra the only commuter rail agency that paints those red-and-white diagonals on the nose of their engines? And, why?