UPDATE: As of Wednesday, October 2, 2013; all regular services have been restored to the CTA Blue Line. All trains are running normally and the damaged trains have been removed from the scene. ~ Source.
The morning of Monday, September 30, 2013 should have been a normal commute day for dozens of Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) Blue Line El commuters, as they traveled from the suburbs in Forest Park to the heart of downtown Chicago. However, this day was anything but ordinary…
At about 8:00am that morning, an out-of-service train had collided with a revenue service train at the Harlem station, just as the revenue service train was preparing to depart towards its next stop. The back of the revenue service train and the front of the out-of-service train were crumpled in an accordian-like manner, with the revenue service train sustaining more damage than the other. Injuries were reported in the incident and some passengers were rushed to area hospitals.
The incident remains a mystery to all. Some witnesses had reported that there was no operator in the front cab of the train, and several fail-safe mechanisms that are in place to prevent such incidents from occurring did not activate. City and state agencies, the National Transportation Safety Board, and other federal agencies, are currently investigating the incident to see what could have gone wrong. Until the exact cause is known however, many questions will remain as to what happened and why.
For the latest travel information along the Blue Line, click here.
