Business
Proposed Express Train Would Take People From Downtown to O’Hare Airport in 15 Minutes
A Chicago-based team is working to get the so-called O’Hare Flyer off the ground in the next five years.
The proposed express train would run from downtown Chicago to Terminal 2 at O’Hare International Airport in just 15 minutes.
This ambitious goal has been in the works for the last three years. If completed, it would be the first airport express train in the United States. While there’s already city transit that takes riders from the Loop to O’Hare, the team said the flyer would run on a dedicated track at speeds up to 80 mph with departures every 15 minutes.
Mark Walbrun, the project’s chief engineer and co-founder, got the idea for the train while working on projects in Europe, where there are already a handful of express airport trains across the continent. He said he began thinking, “Chicago has a lot of rail corridors. There must be a way to tie all this together.”
“The corridors that we looked at were the last two that were built into Chicago,” Walbrun said. “The first ones were built in the 1840s. These were built way later, and because of that, they were built straight and fast. They were primarily used for freight, but they were of the design that allows us to use them to go faster. We have to make improvements on those corridors and build new tracks, but the actual right-of-way itself is designed for this kind of speed.”
Walbrun said there’s no conflict with Metra, Amtrak or CTA lines, emphasizing that the tracks his team plans to put down would be theirs alone, meaning only they can dispatch and control them.
The $2.25 billion project is not seeking government subsidies or funding that could otherwise go to regional transit agencies. Instead, the O’Hare Flyer team has so far funded the project through private investors and intends to raise more money in the capital markets.
“O’Hare is an airport where traffic and customer flyers are coming in and out all the time,” co-founder Kristi Lafleur said. “Those numbers are projected to grow over the next couple of years significantly. It has all the makings of a great service, a world-class airport, a world-class downtown, and we’re going to be connecting the two with a world-class train service.”
The train stop would be placed just west of the Old Post Office in the West Loop, a block from Union Station and a block from the Clinton Blue Line stop.
“The biggest benefit is from an economic development standpoint,” co-founder and CEO Dave Lundy said. “Think about what it’s going to mean when we try to sell conventions, when we try to sell corporate headquarters. If we get to tell people, if you show up at our station at 0, 15, 30, and 45, you will be at O’Hare in 15 minutes reliably every time. It’s a golden opportunity for this city to be able to up its economic development opportunities.”
