Chicago again... transit police take action

I'm in the Windy City again, this time to attend the American Railway Engineering and Maintenance-of-way Association (AREMA) Annula Conference. With a name like that you can probably guess that it's just a swinging time. It took forever to fly to Chicago today from DFW. Amy dropped me at the airport around 11:30AM under bright and sunny skies, which I was glad to see considering that earlier in the week it was predicted that the doom of hurricane Rita would be right over DFW at noon on Sunday. I checked in to discover that my 1PM flight had been cancelled and that I had been rebooked on the 3PM flight. So I had soem time to kill at the airport. However, this game me a chance to ride the new secure-side Skylink train for two laps around the entire airport. It's a pretty slick system and it gives you a great perspective of all the aircraft parked at the gates. Fanatstic if you have an interest in airplanes.

After boarding the American flight to Chicago, we were taxied over to a far corner of the airfield where we stopped and the pilot shut the engines down. Apparently we had not escaped Rita who was now spawning a series of severe thunderstorms across much of Illinois, closing Chicago O'hare to inbound flights. With no place to land, they wouldn't let us take off from DFW so we sat on a far removed lonely taxiway, baking in the hot Texas sun. After an hour delay, we finally departed for Chicago.

The flight was moslty uneventful with the exception of the last half-hour or so when we started to encounter the severe weather ssystems and things got really bumpy. We popped out of the clouds in Chicago moments before landing; the city was completely socked in and rainy. But we were there.

I collected my bags and made my way down to the CTA station to take the L-train to the downtown loop where I was staying for the conference. As I was buying my train pass, a man sprinted past and jumped over the turnstiles leading to the station. Several transit police officers gave chase down the stairs as the man slipped through the doors of a train and it began to depart the station. The officers radioed the opertor to stop the train and open the doors. The train screeched to a halt and the officers boarded the train and performed a car-by-car search looking for the offender. By this time I had made my way to the train and one of the officers waved for me to board. I just happened to enter the car where they were subduing the offender, who was resisting violently. Three officers struggled to place handcuffs on the man. Once cuffed, the offender decided to act like a sack of potatos, goign limp except to snag his feet on the seats in the train car to make his extraction as difficult as possible. The officers literally dragged the man right past me and off of the train, the whole time he was spewing expletives and saying that next time they saw him hed have his piece on him and would blast a cap in their collective asses. As they dragged him off down the platform the doors claosed and the train departed on its 45-minute journey to the Loop.

The rest of the ride was uneventful and I made it to the Palmer House Hilton downtown just after 8PM and checked in to my room. I was surprised to find that it had a nice view of the Chicago skyline and I could even see the Navy Pier ferris wheel. Since the last thing I ate was a Subway sandwich around 11, I went down to the Big Downtown on Wabash under the L-train line for some deep dish pizza. Mmmm good.