Ah, the commute: Curse the alarm clock, check the weather, grab the paper/coffee/briefcase and race out the door to catch the train.
Every workday, more than 31,000 riders carry out this breakneck ballet to ride one of Metra’s three passenger service lines that stretch through Du Page County.
More than 94 percent of those riders are traveling to work. As a percentage of the population (there are 433,000 employed adults in the county), that makes the county No. 1 in the state for commuter use of the railroad as the usual means to get to work, according to data compiled by the Chicago Area Transportation Study.
Most Du Page riders take the train to work not because they have to but because they want to, said Chris Knapton, Metra spokesman.
“On a typical workday, 84 percent of our Du Page commuters say that they have cars available to them,” Knapton said. “That means they’re here by choice, so we have to make the ride as pleasant as possible.”
Metra runs three lines with a total of 27 stations through Du Page, including the Chicago & North Western West line, the Milwaukee District West line and the Burlington Northern line.
“I always wanted to avoid the hassle of driving and parking downtown every day,” said Walter Covay of Naperville, who commuted from the Chicago & North Western Lombard station for nearly 36 years before he retired six years ago.
Although he called himself “not a part of the herd anymore,” Covay still uses the Burlington Northern with his wife, Therese, for their occasional visits to Chicago.
“I’ve always thought taking the train was the easiest,” in terms of time and money, said Cindy Smith, a paralegal from Bartlett who has taken the Milwaukee West line to her job in Chicago for three years.
“I can’t imagine trying to drive every day. It’s 1 1/2 hours door to door if traffic is okay,” Smith said. The train ride is only an hour. “But the drawback to commuting by train is you have to be on schedule.”
Being on time separates the calm commuters from the commuters who seem to travel at warp speed.
“It’s rush-rush-rush between 6 and 8 a.m.,” said Ben Piatz, Burlington Northern ticket agent at the downtown Naperville station, the busiest Metra stop in Du Page with an average of 3,200 passengers a day.
On any given morning, you’ll see plenty of riders arriving early to line up along the boarding area of the platform. They stare westward down the track, as if it will bring the train a bit faster, Piatz said.
But the age of computerized dispatching is doing a good job of keeping the trains on schedule, which is bad news for those who daily tempt fate by pulling into the station at the last moment, trying to buy a paper or cup of coffee and still catch the express.
“Five minutes is a lifetime to a lot of people,” said Piatz, who has been with the Burlington Northern since 1966. “Some people, the same people, run late every day. They have it down to five seconds. It makes me nervous to watch them.”
“People are hysterical,” said Becky Sefton, owner of Sweetpea’s Coffee Shop, next to the Naperville station. “There’s six sessions of four minutes of intense panic.”
“You have to be a little more awake than anyone else,” said Carol Riehle, owner of the Depot Express at the Geneva Chicago & North Western station.
“Commuters who come in the morning often only have 30 seconds to catch their train,” she said. “Before they come to the counter, we’ve got their order in front of them and they’ve got their money in hand.”
Some try to jump on as the train begins to move, a practice that makes conductors shudder.
“You see it all the time,” said Milwaukee West conductor Paul Hegge. Some walk in front of the train or crawl under it to get to the platform. If I see someone doing something like that, I won’t let them on the train.”
Once safely on the train, commuters are still creatures of habit, said Mark Westenberg, Hegge’s fellow conductor on the Milwaukee West line.
“Regular riders have their `regular’ seats,” he said. “If someone else is sitting in one of them, the regular may stand and stare at them for a while or even say something.”
“They each even have a special place to put their tickets,” Hegge added. “I know where they hide them-here, there, in the window, sticking out of a shoe, a pocket.”
“The regular commuters sit together, like a family,” said Westenberg, who with Hegge makes three round trips a day from northwest Kane County to Union Station and back.
They often celebrate events including birthdays, anniversaries, retirements and baby showers, Westenberg said.
Last year, one group of Chicago & North Western regulars hosted a Christmas party to be remembered, said WLIT radio announcer Margo Johnson of Aurora, who then commuted from Wheaton.
“I was part of this crazy group of afternoon train people who would sit together in the first car and sing old TV sitcom and commercial songs and tell jokes,” Johnson said. “It was all very 7th grade.”
For their holiday party, Johnson and her extended train family brought champagne for the whole car, placed battery-operated candles in the window and passed out sheets of Christmas songs, which everyone sang from Chicago to Geneva.
“Can you imagine all these folks in suits and trenchcoats singing the `Twelve Days of Christmas?’ ” Johnson said. “When we left to go home, everyone was hugging and kissing-all these strangers.”
Not everyone is as enthusiastic about the commuting experience. Some riders complain about cramped parking areas, while others feel trains do not run frequently enough, particularly during off-peak times. Many would-be commuters find that lack of feeder buses or other public transportation makes it just too hard to use the commuter rail lines.
For most riders, the best part of commuting to work continues to be the time it allows you to read, work, converse, play cards or even sleep, according to Mike Lellios, a real estate developer and lifelong West Chicago resident who commuted to work as a sales manager in Chicago for 12 years.
“You know that 99 percent of the time, the train is on time,” Lellios said. “It gets you into the city in 45 minutes. There isn’t a better value for the money.”
