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Thursday, January 01, 2015

Have you ever been to Chicago and took the L?

[VIDEO] I've been an L rider all my life. Spent many a Saturday in my youth riding to downtown with my mother when she used to work at a bank downtown. Now I spend a lot of time on the CTA getting to school or work or just getting out of the house for a few hours.

Today I have a tourist piece for you. Strangely enough I'm starting with the yellow line aka Skokie Swift. Skokie is an adjacent suburb of Chicago and the CTA does have L service which travels to nearby suburbs such as Skokie, Evanston, Cicero, Oak Park & Forest Park.

Either way I realised that I've traveled on almost everyline of the CTA L system. Only recently - that is within the last 10 or so years my travels have taken me to all of the CTA's colored lines.

When I attended community college in downtown Chicago I traveled the blue line to O'Hare, Forest Park and 54/Cermak. Now the 54/Cermak branch is part of the pink line as a result of service changes. I also took the train from Ashland/63 and Cottage Grove to get downtown via the green line. Also I traveled the red line from 95th all the way to Howard and changed to the purple from Howard to get to Linden. Finally I took the orange from downtown to Midway and back.

Since then I've taken the pink line with some video that needs to be digitized in the future. Also for the first time I took the brown line all the way to Kimball and took the green line to it's west side terminal at Harlem Avenue. Since I've started working I've taken the yellow line on two occasions mainly to get up to Old Orchard mall and that means I'd have to take the bus from the Skokie stop.

I forgot to note the quirk of the purple line. While the purple is a local service within Evanston when it stops at Howard it becomes an express during rush hour with no stops until Belmont. When I worked briefly in Evanston to make up some time I took the express train to get to work there.

Needless to say there have been many interesting adventures on CTA as you can sometimes tell if you follow me on twitter. If only I had such a tool during the pre-twitter/social media days.

There's more videos of other CTA routes via their YouTube page.

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