The Metra system is coming back online Monday afternoon after an outage that lasted about two hours caused disruptions and delays in service, a Metra spokesperson said.
Meg Reile said the initial system outage happened about 10:50 a.m. and affected Metra’s dispatchers and ability to monitor train movement and speeds. The system began coming back online shortly before 1 p.m.
“Our dispatchers weren’t able to see things properly, so we had train movement stopped or very much slowed down,” Reile said.
The outage was after the morning rush when ridership is typically lower, Reile said, but couldn’t say how many passengers were affected. The evening commuter rush will likely be impacted as a result of the earlier outage.
“People should expect there may be some changes to the evening service, but as long as we stay online we should be able to get people home in the evening,” Reile said.
The cause of the outage is yet to be determined, she said.
The first notification on Metra’s X page shortly before 11 a.m. informed of a train scheduled to depart the 93rd Street South Chicago station at 10:45 a.m. that was delayed. Subsequent notifications alerted of other trains experiencing delays, like one arriving to University Park and others coming to the city.
“Inbound and outbound train movement halted due to positive train control system outage,” one post said. “The estimated time of delay is unknown. Metra will update this information as it becomes available.”
Other trains were canceled, including one scheduled to leave University Park at 12:55 p.m.
Trains in and out of South Chicago and the Blue Island branch were also halted due to the system outage.
“Extensive delays” were expected for inbound and outbound trains that were stopped near Museum Campus and then back up and running as of 12:03 p.m., another post said.
Metra services downtown Chicago with over 240 stations and 11 routes.
