CTA Vintage Car Ride

everyday life 1 Minute

Yesterday, I received a surprise email from CTA, announcing the vintage L-train ride around the Loop (to celebrate the 78th anniversary of the CTA)

Today, when I spoke to the volunteers on the train, they told me that they purposely announced it at the last minute to avoid the crowds. There was still quite a crowd, as they kept saying, “pre-pandemic ridership level.”

And it was so much fun! The train was almost 100 years old, and it had been in service for fifty years!

Everything in the car was exactly like it looked in the 20s-30s, plus some later advertisements, and the conductor announced the stops using the hand-held radio.

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Published by Hettie D.

My name is Henrietta (Hettie) Dombrovskaya. I was born in Saint-Petersburg, Russian (actually, back then – Leningrad, USSR) in 1963, and immigrated to the United States in 1996. I love Saint Petersburg, the city I was born and raised in, and I think it’s one of the most beautiful places in the world. Similarly (but differently) I love Chicago, and can’t imagine myself moving somewhere else in the observable future. I have three children, Igor, Vlad and Anna, all adults living on their own, and one (so far) granddaughter Nadia. I also believe that my children are the best thing that happened in my life. As for my professional life, I am working in the field of Information Technologies. When I was twenty, I’ve declared that the databases are the coolest thing invented and that I want to do them for the rest of my life. Thirty plus years later, I still believe it’s true, and still, believe that the databases are the best. These two statements together imply that I think a person can have it all, and indeed, I think so! Keep reading my journals to find out how I did it.

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One thought on “CTA Vintage Car Ride”

  1. Nice! I saw the train just south of Pratt as it was headed toward the Loop. Heard it before I saw it actually as it has a distinctive horn, rather like a steam locomotive, but I wasn’t able to whip out my camera quickly enough to catch it.

    I was wondering what brought it out of storage to run. When I started to feel regret over missing an opportunity to ride it, I reminded myself that I actually rode those “4000-series” cars in their last year of regular revenue service…

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