May 30, 2025
Dear South Shore Line Riders,
It’s been a few months since my last letter in November 2024, and we’ve made significant progress since then. Although safety is always our number one priority, we know how much performance matters. Our mission over the past year has been, daily, to earn your trust that your train will arrive at its destination on time. Our overall on-time performance, especially during our peak service periods, is nearing 90% on a regular basis, and we have numerous days without a single late train in these service windows. Our off-peak service is also performing well, although the results have not been quite as good. These trains are often impacted by construction projects, especially on the Metra corridor, where both NICTD and Metra are investing heavily in major infrastructure improvement projects over the next several years. Our commitment to delivering on our promise to you, with respect to service reliability, has not wavered, and we will continue to find ways to improve.
At this past Wednesday’s meeting of the Northern Indiana Commuter Transportation District’s (NICTD) Board of Trustees, we presented a request to increase our base fares on our one-way tickets by 10%. We made this recommendation to the NICTD Board, knowing that fare increases are never popular, and we always look to find ways to avoid implementing them for as long as possible. Our last fare increase was in 2018, and we put that increase in place to offset the additional costs of implementing the federally mandated Positive Train Control system. Since that time, we have experienced significant ridership losses and associated revenue as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as inflationary pressures exceeding 30%. Because we have always operated on a very fiscally conservative basis and maintained appropriate cash reserves, we have been able to offset increases in operating costs and decreases in revenue.
However, without additional funding from the State, our ability to continue providing service was at risk. Our funding issues are not unique and are referred to across the country in the transit industry as the “fiscal cliff.” For NICTD, we would have hit this cliff sometime later this year or early in 2026. Fortunately, the State of Indiana recognizes the tremendous value that our passenger rail service provides and identified a funding solution to support our operations for the next couple of years. We will continue to work with our state partners on addressing our funding needs, and we are confident that a long-term solution will be identified. It is imperative in seeking this funding solution that the State knows that NICTD is doing everything it can to help resolve this issue, including growing ridership, being operationally efficient, and maintaining an appropriate fare structure. When looking at our fare increase that will go into effect on July 1st, 2025, please note that we have increased the discounts on our 10-ride and 25-ride tickets from 5% to 10% and from 10% to 20%, respectively. We are closely examining ridership trends and know many of you who use our service to commute to work in Chicago no longer are in the office 5 days a week but rather travel downtown between 1-3 days per week. We are offering these increases to our multi-ride tickets to reflect these changes in work patterns and hope you will see value in these tickets.
Finally, at Wednesday’s Board meeting, I provided an update on the status of the start date for our new Monon Corridor (also known as our West Lake Corridor project) service, which was originally expected to start this month. Over the past year or so, we have been reporting to the Board and the public that the completion of a bridge under CSX Railroad at the Munster/Dyer Station area was causing a delay in the schedule, pushing back the start of service to the end of October. The good news that I reported at the Board meeting was that this new bridge structure was installed this week. Unfortunately, we have now discovered that a portion of the construction needs to be reworked to install low-voltage current isolation measures required by the contract. These measures are standard practices for electrified railroads like ours and are necessary to avoid potential corrosion to nearby utilities. We are currently in discussions with our contractor regarding the process to implement this corrective action, but we expect this required correction will delay the start of revenue service to at least the end of the year.
This delay to the start of the Monon Corridor service is truly disappointing news. Please be assured that we are doing everything we can to deliver this long-awaited project as quickly as possible, and we will update you on the status of the impact of the required rework as additional information becomes available.
As always, thank you for riding the South Shore Line.
Michael Noland
President
South Shore Line/NICTD