See, doesn’t everything just fit right in together? The wooden platform isn’t just a Quincy thing either, I’ve seen those throughout the entire system, but it just works really well here.
“North Quincy, Quincy Center, or Quincy Adams?” I asked after Lee Crooks announced “Quincy is next” along our Pink Line train as we were preparing to get off and head to the Sears Tower. With me living nearly 19 years and Caleb living about 4 years in Massachusetts, we both got the joke. Stormy, on the other hand, living their whole life in Illinois (I don’t have this one fact-checked), did not get the joke. In Boston, there are 4 MBTA stations in the city of Quincy, with 3 of them having “Quincy” in its name (poor Wollaston).
But are we sure that this is an actual rapid transit station? This place looks and feels like a heritage railway station. It does not fit in with the hustle and bustle of modern-day downtown Chicago that the station is located in. Yet, the station is fully ADA accessible. It’s quite a quaint little station where everything about it just fits right together. Makes sense, the station was opened in 1897 (that’s older than both my high school and college, just barely though). The heritage station feel was brought in the mid-1980s during a restoration project, and further improvements were made about 5 years ago to make the station accessible.
The station is like all the others in the Loop, with two side platforms, however, there is no free transfer between directions here. The small headhouse along each platform contains turnstiles and fare machines at platform level. Such transfers can be made at Washington/Wells, the next stop north, or LaSalle/Van Buren, the next stop southeast. This station is the closest to Union Station, home to both Metra and Amtrak trains.
See, doesn’t everything just fit right in together? The wooden platform isn’t just a Quincy thing either, I’ve seen those throughout the entire system, but it just works really well here.
Non-standard signage? I’ll give it a pass as it’s to give the full effect of this station being historically preserved.
Sometimes, it’s the little details that go a long way. At every CTA station, there is a poster with the schedule for that station. The one for Quincy was modified to have a different font than the rest to fit in with the heritage station feel.
The headhouse on the clockwise (Orange, Pink, Purple Lines) platform. There’s an interesting mix of both old and new in here, but this room is one of my favorite parts of the CTA system.
Posted: Oct 13, 2022 22:39
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