Chicago Union Station gets a new Metropolitan Lounge
Most train stations in major American cities have private lounge rooms that are only available to passengers with sleeping car tickets, business class passengers and riders who earned enough Guest Rewards points to qualify. It's something of a holdover from the days of private rail travel - a space where passengers can relax, get some drinks and snacks and maybe do some work. Oh, and people who sit in the private lounges get to board the train first.
In Chicago, that space is known as the Metropolitan Lounge. Up until recently, it was kind of wedged between Chicago Union Station's north and south boarding lounges (those are the spaces where folks with regular coach tickets wait to board). Amtrak hasn't been particularly happy with this arrangement. The boarding lounges were at capacity, and the Metropolitan Lounge was starting to show its age. So around 2012, it started seriously talking about converting a vacant space on the southeast side of the Great Hall into a larger lounge and expanding the boarding areas once the space freed up.
I never got a chance to step inside the old lounge and get any shots, so here's a 2012 photo by Robert Lingner
Well, a few weeks ago, that first part finally became a reality. And Trains magazine has a pretty cool video report about it.
(I would embed the video in the post, but in spite of my repeated efforts, it wouldn't quite embed properly, so you're going to have to follow the link)
I'm especially intrigued by that last part, which talks about turning Union Station's former women's lounge into a private event space. Which I support. Even after decades of neglect, the space still looks pretty cool.
And right now, Amtrak is just using it to store Christmas decorations and other random bits of inventory. And hopefully, it would mean that companies that rent out the terminal for private events wouldn't use the Great Hall so much.
I mean, it's a pretty picturesque venue, but every time it gets blocked off, it makes the rest of the station even more crowded and blocks off several entrances and exits.
In Chicago, that space is known as the Metropolitan Lounge. Up until recently, it was kind of wedged between Chicago Union Station's north and south boarding lounges (those are the spaces where folks with regular coach tickets wait to board). Amtrak hasn't been particularly happy with this arrangement. The boarding lounges were at capacity, and the Metropolitan Lounge was starting to show its age. So around 2012, it started seriously talking about converting a vacant space on the southeast side of the Great Hall into a larger lounge and expanding the boarding areas once the space freed up.
I never got a chance to step inside the old lounge and get any shots, so here's a 2012 photo by Robert Lingner
Well, a few weeks ago, that first part finally became a reality. And Trains magazine has a pretty cool video report about it.
(I would embed the video in the post, but in spite of my repeated efforts, it wouldn't quite embed properly, so you're going to have to follow the link)
I'm especially intrigued by that last part, which talks about turning Union Station's former women's lounge into a private event space. Which I support. Even after decades of neglect, the space still looks pretty cool.
And right now, Amtrak is just using it to store Christmas decorations and other random bits of inventory. And hopefully, it would mean that companies that rent out the terminal for private events wouldn't use the Great Hall so much.
I mean, it's a pretty picturesque venue, but every time it gets blocked off, it makes the rest of the station even more crowded and blocks off several entrances and exits.