Chicago, IL (CHI)

Ticket Revenue

FY 2009

$171,735,216

Station Ridership

FY 2009

3,080,564

Note: Fiscal year is from
October through September.

Chicago Union Station, begun in 1913 and completed in 1925, was built for a consortium of five railroads, headed by the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR): the Pennsylvania Company (owner of the PRR); the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad; Michigan Central Railroad; Chicago and Alton Railroad and the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railway, collectively doing business as the Chicago Union Station Company (CUSCo). They desired a grand station befitting the city’s status as a national railroad hub, and this $75 million station replaced the city’s overcrowded 1881 Grand Passenger Station. Daniel Burnham, Chicago’s famous architect who was also responsible for designing Washington, D.C.’s Union Station, began designing this Beaux Arts station, but died before plans were completed. Graham, Anderson, and Probst, later joined by White, took over his work.

Union Station is the only example in the United States of a “double-stub” station, where the 24 tracks approach from two directions and most do not continue under or through the station. The exterior of the station is clad in Bedford limestone and was quarried in Indiana. Together with the approach and storage tracks, the entire station facility takes up nearly 10 city blocks, The original complex incorporated two different buildings on either side of Canal Street, connected below street level.

The west side building, the head house, contains the Great Hall—the waiting room, if such a mundane term may be applied for this soaring, beautiful space in a building that takes up an entire city block. The Great Hall has a 300-foot-long barrel-vaulted skylight that soars 115 feet over the room. The skylight ceiling was blacked-out during World War II in order to make the station less of a target for enemy aircraft, since the station served nearly 100,000 daily passengers and more than 300 daily arrivals and departures. Two figural statues tower over the Great Hall on its east wall, one representing day (holding a rooster) and the other representing night (holding an owl), a recognition of the 24-hour nature of passenger railroading. Along with marble floors with long wooden benches, marble walls with large Corinthian columns and its equally grand staircase entrances in the Great Hall, the head house has side halls and office space. According to the original plan, the building would also have had 26 floors of office space, but only eight were completed.

Its companion was the concourse building, on the east side of Canal Street. This glass-vaulted concourse was modeled upon that of the historic Pennsylvania Station in New York City. As with Penn Station, this one is now gone, having been torn down in 1969 and replaced by two office buildings. Today’s passenger concourse is almost entirely beneath the streets and skyscrapers as well as the head house.

In 1991, work was completed on a $32 million passenger facilities improvement project that included renewal of the station’s waiting areas, new ticket windows, baggage handling system and the removal of the black-out paint from the Great Hall’s skylight. Lucien Lagrange & Associates handled the design of the project, which dramatically improved the facilities created when the Concourse Building was razed. On May 1, 2002, the building was finally designated a Chicago Landmark.

Since 1972, all Amtrak services in Chicago originate and terminate at Chicago Union Station, fulfilling Burnham’s 1909 vision of all intercity trains using the same station without confusing station transfers, complicated railcar movements, difficult baggage forwarding and complex ticketing previously endured by generations of travelers. Union Station is also the largest of the downtown terminals used by Metra, which is formally known as the Northeast Illinois Regional Commuter Rail Corporation. Metra operates commuter rail service between the downtown Chicago and 240 stations in northeast Illinois, on 11 routes covering approximately 500 miles of service territory. Six of Metra's 11 routes operate into and out of Union Station with nearly 130,000 Metra passengers passing through the station on an average weekday and more than 42,000 each weekend. Metra’s schedule includes 248 weekday arrivals or departures from Union Station. Weekend service is also provided on four of the six lines.

The five railroads that formed CUSCo have since been absorbed by other lines and no longer exist as independent firms. The names of these founding railroads are remembered on windows between the Canal Street entrances to Union Station and the Great Hall. CUSCo has been wholly owned by Amtrak since May 1984, when the remaining ownership shares were purchased from what are now known as the BNSF and the Canadian Pacific railways. CUSCo has selected a firm to redevelop the head house building without marring its historic character. The high rise office building above the head house of the original plans might indeed take shape. Similar ventures in the past decade did not come to fruition; so more options are being considered.

And, while the magnificent, historic Great Hall is used for major events and has been used in TV and films such as The Untouchables, My Best Friend’s Wedding, Chain Reaction, ER and Early Edition—it was always meant to be a working structure and was designed to accommodate large crowds and heavy daily use. The Great Hall is now used for passenger queuing space, when the passenger concourse bursts with activity at peak periods. CUSCo is considering plans to improve the passenger concourse and relocate more passenger service functions into the head house.

These projects are seen as a way to prepare this major hub for higher frequency and higher speed rail as it is developed in the Midwest. By one estimate, made in 2009, the total yearly ridership through Chicago Union Station (both Metra and Amtrak) of 31.6 million passengers will grow by 49 percent to 47.3 million in 2025.

As part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, it is planned that Chicago Union Station receive several improvements (a completely separate project from the head house redevelopment), to include security-related screening, particulate detection systems, public signage and placement of video screens in passenger areas. This project’s estimated cost is $1,550,000.

The name “Chicago” derives from a word in the language spoken by the Miami and Illinois native peoples meaning “striped skunk,” a word they also applied to the wild leek. This became the Indian name for the Chicago River, in recognition of the presence of wild leeks in the watershed. When early French explorers began adopting the word, with a variety of spellings, in the late 17th century, it came to refer to the site at the mouth of the Chicago River.

The short, swampy portage between the Chicago Rivers and the Des Plaines River—between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River watershed—attracted the attention of French explorers in the 17th century. In 1696, French Jesuits built the Mission of the Guardian Angel in the area to Christianize the native peoples. The first permanent non-native settlement after this was Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable, who built the first trading post on the Chicago River in the 1770s. The land was later ceded to the U.S. for a military outpost, used in the War of 1812. The Potawatomi ceded the land entirely in the 1816 Treaty of St. Louis. On August 12, 1833, the town of Chicago was incorporated, enclosing an area about 3/8 of a square mile. The state of Illinois granted the rapidly growing city its charter on March 4, 1837.

Since its inception, Chicago has been a trade nexus. The opening of the Illinois and Michigan Canal in 1848 permitted shipping from the Great Lakes through Chicago to the Mississippi River. The same year, the first rail line to Chicago, the Galena and Chicago Union Railroad, was completed; steam-powered grain elevators were introduced; the telegraph arrived; and the Chicago Board of Trade was founded.

In 1871, most of the city burned in the Great Chicago Fire. The damage from the fire was immense: 300 people died, 18,000 buildings were destroyed, and nearly a third of the residents were left homeless. The fire led to the incorporation of stringent fire-safety codes and a preference for masonry construction. However, the soft, swampy ground near the lake was unsuitable for tall masonry buildings, leading directly to the innovation of using steel frames in buildings and the invention of the skyscraper, making Chicago a leader in architecture and setting the model for achieving vertical city densities nationwide.

Between 1870 and 1900, Chicago grew from a city of 300,000 to nearly 1.7 million, the fastest-growing city ever at the time. The flourishing economy drew new residents from rural communities as well as immigrants from Europe. The city’s retail sectors came to dominate the Midwest and greatly influence the nation’s economy. The Chicago Union Stockyards dominated the meat-packing trade, and the city also became the world’s largest rail hub.

Many of the railroads built west of Chicago had corporate headquarters in the city, as well as their yards and shops. Chicago became a center of manufacture of freight cars, passenger cars (Pullman Company), and later, diesel locomotives (Electro-Motive, in suburban LaGrange). Until the 1960s, the Chicago Loop—the popular name for the Chicago business district located south of the main stem of the Chicago River—contained six major railroad terminals for intercity passenger traffic, as lines ended in Chicago, but did not pass through it. Travelers would often take the necessary layover as an opportunity for sightseeing. Chicago Union Station is the busiest passenger terminal in Chicago and is most intact of the four remaining downtown train stations. Hundreds of thousands of area residents still commute to the Loop by train daily, via Metra’s numerous routes and on the Chicago Transit Authority trains that still circle the central business district on elevated tracks and in two subways on the eight route “L” system.

An early cultural high-point in the city’s history was the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, which was constructed on former marshland at the present location of Jackson Park, along Lake Michigan. The land was reclaimed according to a plan by architect Frederick Law Olmstead, and the pavilions, which followed a classical theme, were designed by a committee of the city’s architects under the direction of Daniel Burnham. This occasion was also the beginning of the Chicago School of Architecture, which continued to influence the world up through the middle of the 20th century.

Today, Chicago is the largest city in both Illinois and the Midwest, and the third most populous city in the United States, and a major transportation hub in the United States. The city is an important component of global trade, as it is the third largest intermodal port in the world after Hong Kong and Singapore. Additionally, it is the only city in North America where six Class I railroads meet, and about 1/3 of the nation’s freight trains move through Chicago.

Amtrak Blue Water and Pere Marquette are financed primarily through funds made available by the Michigan Department of Transportation. Service on the Lincoln Service, Illinois Zephyr, Carl Sandburg, Illini, and Saluki are financed primarily through funds made available through the Illinois Department of Transportation (Illinois DOT). The Hiawatha Service is financed primarily through funds made available by the Wisconsin Department of Transportation, in a partnership with the Illinois DOT.

Amtrak provides both ticketing and baggage services at Chicago Union Station station, which is served by 58 daily trains.