The last several hours we were in Chicago, we decided to stick around and wait to drive out until the rush hour had mostly passed. Since Brian is fond of maps and likes to look at how things (roads, bridges, other transit) fit together, we decided to ride the elevated train that the City of Chicago calls the ‘L.’ (Some folks spell this “el” but the City uses the stylized ‘L’ in its literature.) A ride on the ‘L’ is a little bit like a walk through a 3-D map, and a lot like being a fly on the wall, peeking and listening without being noticed.

An elevated train is a wonderful perch, literally up in the tops of the tallest trees, from which to see the lay of the land. You can see the back sides of businesses, back yards, junk areas not visible from the street. You can also see spectacular vistas, peeking down a busy street or viewing an important downtown landmark from a distance.

We were amazed at how close the train goes to some of the buildings. It looked in places as though there was a clearance of less than two feet. Considering that an elevated train makes a *lot* more noise than a subway, and goes by much more often than other types of trains, it must be a significant disturbance to normal living (you have to stop talking when the ‘L’ passes by) to live there. However, the real estate surely would be more affordable for places that close to a high-noise source, and that might be a welcome tradeoff in a high-priced city real estate market.

I have uploaded 72 photos (yeah, really… and I deleted all the blurry ones) of the ride, to my Flickr account as a set. I only added comments to the last photo, noting that it was taken after we had exited the train and walked several blocks north from the station. All other photos were taken starting on the Brown line (north) starting at the Western stop, and on the way to the loop/downtown. My camera ran out of storage space just about when we hit the loop, so I took no photos on the way back up.

Since there are no comments on the photos, you will lose no information if you run the photo set as a slideshow. You can imagine *you* are on that train looking out the window as I was just Monday.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 at 4:03 pmand is filed under Miscellaneous Artforms, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.