Chaos clawed at the morning commute for many Chicagoans, first as a Metra train on the Far South Side made an unusual stop Tuesday morning by clipping a stalled van and then as an Orange Line train derailed in McKinley Park Monday, proving yet again that the mechanized ballet we trust to cart us to our lives is susceptible to the gremlins of chance and malfunction. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, the Metra Rock Island train was involved in a collision with a van that had stopped on the tracks near 111th Street and Marshfield Avenue around 7 a.m., the vehicle was abandoned by its driver before impact, and thankfully, no injuries reported, while roughly 200 bewildered passengers found themselves disembarking the train unexpectedly.
The derailment happened near the 35th/Archer station around 6:30 a.m., and even as the shaken passengers were ferried from limbo to solid ground by 8:30 a.m. the incident was significant enough to disrupt the entire Orange Line with major delays, the Chicago Tribune reports, an ominous reminder that the CTA could not immediately attribute the cause to weather though the ice of January has a known history of buckling the staunchest steel jaunting across these storied rails.
The derailment was described by the CTA as "comparatively minor," which is akin to saying that any disruption that does not lead to tragedy is but a hiccup in the city's vast transit organism, a network coursing through Chicago's arterial streets. As the day unfolded, regular service suspensions and reroutes ordered lives into new patterns, with free shuttle buses stepping in to bridge the gap between Ashland and 35th/Archer.
Adding insult to injury, the Metra took a weather-beaten knee as well, with advisories slatting the untreated air that trains on the Union Pacific Northwest and Milwaukee District North lines would lag 20 to 30 minutes behind, one might consider this patience-testing as another symptom of living within the whims of a metropolitan giant – because if the weather did not claim enough of a toll, the Metra Electric line was also reportedly operating 20 to 45 minutes late due to emergency track repairs, details kept close to the vest about whether Jack Frost was indeed to blame.
