I recently learned about the 1923 Kelker Plan for rapid transit in Chicago thanks to a Reddit post. I had never seen it before, and I found the plan to be super interesting and ambitious. It had been a while since I created a fantasy transit map of Chicago (I used to do this a lot in college, but my work is lost to a bricked laptop, I fear), so I decided to get busy, looking at the Kelker plan in concert with the existing CTA to create what can be best described as an alternate universe transit network, one where the city looks at least somewhat different than it does today owing to the urban development that this network would offer.
In the end, I created a system with 280 stations, roughly double that of the current CTA. I am not trying to pass this off as realistic or a potential plan for expansion of the current system - this was just an exercise to imagine how the CTA could look if the Kelker plan had been implemented in the early 20th century, as well as accounting for how the city looks today. This alternate universe assumes that the full Interstate highway network in Chicago would still be built out, for example. You can see a diagram of my plan by downloading the attached .json and loading it onto this site - keep in mind that Brand New Subway doesn’t offer a lot of control over the direction of the lines between stations, so this is just a diagram and not a precise track map. BNS also can’t account for branches that well, but I did my best. It also can’t account for looping tracks, but - spoiler alert - that isn’t of concern in this plan!
This was a lot of fun to create, and for an added level of fun (..?) I created a database in Notion which delineates each station and some details about it, in case that’s of interest. Below, I’ll walk through each line I created and elaborate on some of the choices I made. I’d love any feedback on this, keeping in mind that this is an alternate history exercise above all else. 🙂
Departing from Linden station in Wilmette, the Purple Line makes all the same stops it currently does as it approaches Howard. The Purple Line meets the new Pink Line at Davis, providing service to the corridor roughly paralleling Ravenswood Avenue (more on that later). As you can see, Howard is de-emphasized as a transit hub in my plan, only serving the Purple Line, but I imagine it would continue to serve as an important bus hub for those commuting between Chicago and Evanston. From Howard, the Purple Line takes over the alignment of the real world Red Line, and I took a page out of one of the proposed alternatives for the RPM and removed some stations (Jarvis, Thorndale and Lawrence) to provide more efficiency in this section, since service in these neighborhoods is supplemented by the new Pink Line. The Purple Line meets the new Red Line at Wilson and Broadway and continues along the real-world Red Line corridor to North/Halsted, providing transfers to the Brown Line as expected as well as the new Silver Line at Halsted. Continuing as a subway as suggested by the Kelker plan, we see another transfer opportunity to the Red Line at North and LaSalle, and from here, the line provides service to the Gold Coast and Magnificent Mile running underneath Inner LSD and Michigan Avenue. At Millennium Park, I have the Purple Line take over the current alignment of the Metra Electric and South Shore Lines, making most expected stops - I made some changes to integrate this corridor more closely with the existing bus network, and removed some stations for efficiency’s sake. At 63rd and Dorchester, the Purple Line meets the eastern branch of the South Side Green Line, making all stops along our world’s South Chicago corridor of the Metra Electric til it terminates at 93rd.
The Pink Line’s northern terminus is at Davis, where it then runs express along the UPN alignment to a new station at Rogers/Clark, continuing to parallel this alignment but providing more stops than the UPN does. This segment is not included in the Kelker plan, but I thought it made sense to provide rapid transit service to West Ridge and Andersonville given the high population density here and the fact that current trips from this area to downtown take upwards of an hour. A transfer to the new Red Line subway occurs at Wilson/Ravenswood (I imagine this alternate universe Metra would have the Ravenswood station located a block south to serve this transfer point as well). The Pink Line would slip into the Brown Line alignment somewhere between Montrose and Irving Park, and it would depart from this section near the existing Paulina station to serve an elevated rail corridor along Ashland as proposed by Kelker, making most expected stops. The Pink Line would then provide supplemental service to the Milwaukee Avenue subway starting at Division, then taking on a new subway alignment underneath Chicago Avenue, linking up with the Brown Line again at Chicago/Franklin and making all stops in concert with the Brown Line, just underground rather than elevated. The Pink Line would once again link up with the Blue Line subway at Clinton and UIC-Halsted before turning southwest along Blue Island Avenue to serve Pilsen. The Pink Line would re-emerge as an elevated service at a new station at Cullerton/Paulina to provide a transfer with the new Orange Line, and then take on its real-world alignment starting at Damen to its western terminus in Cicero.
This line is legitimately insane, but let’s have some fun! The Yellow Line is the first of 3 lines which do not enter downtown - instead, this line serves as a trunk line for the West Side, providing transfer opportunities to all downtown-bound services besides the Red Line. This service combines our real world Skokie Swift with Kelker’s proposed elevated lines along California and Kedzie. Starting at Old Orchard (we got the Yellow Line extension in this universe), the Yellow Line serves the real world Skokie Swift corridor until it deviates south, serving the heart of West Ridge along an elevated corridor above or next to California Avenue. The Yellow Line sees its first transfer at Francisco where it meets the Brown Line — this transfer point is interesting, as it imagines a Ravenswood Manor with a very different urban fabric than we see today. The Yellow Line swings west to Kedzie and makes its first stop at Montrose before it begins its long journey to 87th Street, never deviating from Kedzie and providing transfers along the way. This proposal by Kelker is interesting to me since it puts an elevated rail service through the heart of Marquette Park. I checked out how Kedzie looks on Google Street View here, and I think this could actually work better on an at-grade alignment through the park in the middle of the street (and perhaps continuing this way all the way to 87th) so it’s less disruptive to the experience of being in the park. Kedzie running through this park is lowkey weird to begin with, so we’re just going with it. (IMHO - just make it a subway, lol).
No surprises here - this is all real-world stuff, other than an infill station at Nagle, so I’ll use this line as my opportunity to talk about how I approached branching in this new system. Likely to the chagrin of some, the Blue Line is once again a branching line in this universe, and I’ve decided to make the Blue and Green Lines into four services with distinct termini, treating them a bit more like the services of the MTA. This one is the most straightforward of the 4, with the commonly observed rush hour routing between O’Hare and UIC-Halsted becoming a permanent service.
In his plan, Kelker proposes an elevated track along the Belmont corridor all the way to Cumberland. This is probably the wildest one to envision out of all of them - this is not a particularly dense part of the city, and I think it’s interesting to imagine how the urban fabric here may have changed if it had rail service. As you might expect, this branch of the Blue Line meets up with the O’Hare branch at Belmont/Kimball, and from here makes its run all the way to Forest Park. I considered adding infill stations along the Forest Park branch (I thought about this for the Dan Ryan branch, too), but I’m kind of biased against these highway median corridors, so I’m treating the Dan Ryan and Eisenhower branches as something of express services relative to their more local nearby services on the Green Line, maintaining the considerable distances between some stations.