CHESTERTON — After opening its long-awaited Double Track service last week, the South Shore Line is adapting to a new schedule.
“I’ll be the first to admit it was a challenging roll out. I’m not going to offer excuses. I’m going to point out challenges and opportunities because they’re there,” said South Shore President Mike Noland during Monday’s Northern Indiana Commuter Transportation District Board meeting.
“It’s the first week of the new restaurant ... all of the food is not coming out of the kitchen on time. Some of it’s not as warm as it needs to be, but we’re getting there. We’re going to hit our stride. There’s plenty of opportunity,” he added.
Double Track NWI, which adds a second set of tracks and station improvements along a 26.6-mile stretch from Michigan City to Gary, opened for service on May 14. The completion of the project was marked the day before with a ribbon cutting at the South Shore’s Miller Station in Gary.
“We really enjoyed the opportunity to celebrate what has been a long time coming. I think Monday was a great day to reflect back and then from Tuesday on we’re looking forward,” Noland said.
The enhanced service adds 14 weekday trains, revised times, reduced travel times and new, limited-stop express service.
“In that schedule we are dramatically reducing schedule times. We’re adding more train frequencies. Hopefully at the end of the day we’ll improve on time performance. Tuesday was not that day,” Noland said.
The new schedule, Noland said, does not have “recovery” incorporated into it.
“It’s based upon what we can do with the schedules that we have in place to operate the railroad,” he explained.
He described the previous schedule’s runtimes as “relaxing.”
“There was a ton of recovery time and that’s the way we’ve been running during construction two and a half years,” Noland said.
“We flipped the switch on Tuesday – it’s not just 14 new trains. We’ve got a brand new schedule with pretty much 51 different changes,” he added.
In the Double Track’s first week of service, the railroad saw 27,660 passengers. During the same week in 2023 the railroad saw 24,823 passengers. In the same week in 2019, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and Double Track construction, the South Shore had 56,580 passengers.
The new service, Noland said, is an adjustment for both riders and the railroad’s employees.
“We had situations where we had passengers on both platforms with a train coming in,” he said.
“We need to get better coordinated. We’re resolving those issues as we go, but when you have passengers looking to board a train, a bunch of people on one platform, a bunch of people on the other, you wait for them to walk down the platform, go across then come back up,” he added.
The South Shore’s schedules, he said, are synced with Chicago’s Metra system.
“If we miss our slots instead of having a clear pathway, we might be behind a Metra local that’s making all stops,” Noland said.
“We are monitoring every movement on every train at every segment because we know what the run times should be,” he added.
Noland said he spent May 15 riding more than a dozen trains and speaking with staff about the challenges they are seeing.
“They’ve come up with some great suggestions about places where we can make improvements,” he said.
“When I look at the train times ... we’re still substantially better than our old schedule,” he added.
Noland said they have found, in some places, difficulty in communicating between engineers on the train and construction leaders along the right-of-way.
“The folks on the ground need to know there’s a train coming through. The time it takes to communicate that between the train and the crew is too long and we wind up going really slowly up to the point where the radio traffic can then be properly communicated,” he said.
The railroad, he said, will look at upgrading radio equipment so that crews can communicate more efficiently.
The South Shore’s other major project, the West Lake Corridor, is about 75 percent finished. West Lake will add an 8-mile line from Hammond to Dyer. The project is expected to be completed in May 2025.
“We’ve been working with one particular issue for a number of months, maybe a couple years now, the finishing up of a bridge on the southern end of the project with CSX,” Noland said.
The bridge, he said, is now in fabrication.
“We’ve tried to get the design done to a point where we could start fabrication. Now we’re going to work on what kind of schedule we can get to get that bridge out of fabrication and then dropped into place,” Noland said.
The next step for West Lake, which Noland said would be a challenge, is the move of the Hammond station to the Gateway station four blocks to the west.
“We currently, in order to make this project happen, have started demolishing the old platform at Hammond,” he said.
To connect the new station at West Lake, Noland said they will need to take a track out of service.
“We’re going to be single tracked for a six-week period. We’re going to have this little bottleneck just to add to the things that we’re dealing with in north Hammond,” he said.
Noland said they expect to move to the new Hammond station by the end of July.
“It will be a great achievement, but to get there, we’re going to have to have a lot of coordination,” he said.
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