August 23, 2024
Dear South Shore Line Riders,
This past Tuesday, the South Shore Line implemented a revised train schedule. The changes in the new schedule reflect opportunities to improve our on-time performance that we identified over the past several months, as well as requests we received from the rider survey we published in late June. We are three days into the new schedule, and we are already seeing improvement in on-time performance, and we expect more to come. Over these past three days we have struggled on occasion with delays due to the Democratic National Convention and a large bridge project in Gary, which has single-tracked 5 miles of our railroad. Both issues will be resolved by next Tuesday, so we should have a much better opportunity to evaluate the new schedule’s effectiveness.
As we have previously stated, we are going to carefully analyze our performance under this new schedule, and if we see the need to make additional schedule adjustments in the future, we will not hesitate to make them to ensure that we deliver on our promise to improve our service. From the train performance we are seeing so far, any schedule adjustments we would likely make would be very targeted and far less comprehensive than the changes we implemented this week.
We need to reiterate once again how much we value the input we received from you over the past several months, especially from the rider survey. We plan on conducting another rider survey in the coming months to continue this dialogue. While improving our on-time performance is one of our main priorities, our highest priority has been, is, and always will be safety.
On behalf of the Board of Directors of the Northern Indiana Commuter Transportation District and all our dedicated South Shore Line employees, we thank you for your continued patience and support. We are committed to living up to our promises of improved performance and are completely focused on bringing you commuter rail service that is truly “Better than Ever!”
Best regards,
Michael Noland
President
South Shore Line/NICTD