2600 Series Car 3109

Location: O’Hare Station, Chicago, IL
Operator of Vehicle: Chicago Transit Authority
Date of Photo: July 22, 2003

After a month’s break, the photos of the month are back!  There’s still a huge queue of photos for me to sort, caption, and upload to the site, covering a period of over 24 months at this point, and one of the reasons there were no photos of the month posts for September did not help to make the queue any shorter.  I have reason to believe there might be some time in early 2025 to make headway on that backlog, but we’ll see.

In the meantime, let’s return to our “regularly scheduled programming.”  I had intended to run this photo last month, so here it is, slightly later than planned.

Last month, the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Blue Line extension to O’Hare Airport.  The extension opened on September 3, 1984 and to mark the occasion, the CTA operated its vintage 6000 Series rail cars between the O’Hare station and the nearby Rosemont Yard.  When the Blue Line reached O’Hare, it was one of the only direct transit connections from a city to its airport at that time.  Chicago would become the first city in the United States to have direct transit service to two airports when the Orange Line to Midway Airport opened in 1993.

I have never been on or seen the CTA 6000 Series cars, so I don’t have any photographs of them.  However, I have been on and photographed the 2600 Series cars that served the Blue Line when the O’Hare extension opened in 1984.  These cars remain in service on the Blue, Orange, and Brown Lines.

For more photos of Ride On’s Gillig Advantage 40 foot buses, please click here.