June 28, 2024
Dear South Shore Line Riders,
This is the third service letter update since the start of the new service on May 14th, and I am happy to report that we continue to see improvement. The morning rush hour remains our strongest performing segment of service, and other pockets of trains are doing very well during the evening rush hour and on weekends. Still, too many of our trains are in the 10-15 minute late category, which is not acceptable to you or us. Over the past month, we have analyzed every train’s run times and identified schedule opportunities that we expect will allow us to improve our on-time performance significantly. We have a draft of a new schedule in near final form.
I want to address the recent service disruption many riders experienced last week when a NIPSCO crew working adjacent to our tracks accidentally damaged a gas line. That event led to multiple trains being late, the cancellation of trains, and, in some cases, hours of delay to our riders. Because every decision we make starts with your safety in mind, we would not allow service to resume until the gas leak was resolved. We worked to bring all trains to stations so that our customers had the option to remain onboard or seek alternative transportation.
We know that extended train delays during events like this are very frustrating to our riders, and we are always looking to minimize them wherever possible. Unfortunately, busing around this gas leak was not an option. We contacted all available bus companies in our service region, and no one had drivers available. During the outage, we updated our riders with the latest information from NIPSCO regarding service restoration. Unfortunately, the times given to us by the on-site NIPSCO team regarding service restoration were overly optimistic.
Last week, we issued a rider survey to solicit your input. We will work to incorporate your suggestions and address your concerns. The survey is active, and you can find it at https://mysouthshoreline.com. We encourage everyone to give us feedback. We will collect responses through next Tuesday, July 2nd, at 4:00 p.m. CDT, at which point we will evaluate opportunities to incorporate your suggestions into our draft schedule. I anticipate that we will be able to implement this new schedule later this summer.
I continue to ask you to be patient with us and once again reaffirm that we are working daily to find opportunities to improve our service.
Best regards,
