Almost 24 hours after a derailment made a mess of the Red, Purple, and Yellow lines in Chicago, the CTA continued to investigate the cause of the incident, and experts were raising concerns about what they called a troubling pattern.
During the evening rush on Thursday, a Yellow Line train derailed in the rail yard near the Howard terminal in the Rogers Park neighborhood, prompting the CTA and firefighters to evacuate approximately 80 passengers from the train. No injuries were reported.
The derailment interrupted service on the Red, Purple, and Yellow lines for several hours. It was at least the fifth derailment by a CTA train since February of 2025. Experts said this pattern is concerning and needs to be addressed.
“We’ve had a really bad period. I mean, the number of derailments is far more than we usually expect, even for a system of our size,” said DePaul University professor and transportation expert Joe Schwieterman. “This is a pretty significant derailment. I mean, some derailments, the wheels, the axles just jump off the tracks and it can be reconfigured quickly. Here, we have a car that’s kind of pushed over into the different mainline it appears, suggesting either that there was some speed happening or something maybe gave way in the tracks.”
Whether the derailment was the result of human error or a maintenance issue, Schwieterman said, “a system can’t function with this many disruptions that occur.”
CTA officials are still investigating what caused the derailment. A Yellow Line train crashed into a snow plow in the same rail yard in 2023, sending 16 people to the hospital.
“This is a system that’s at least 80, 90 years old. It’s, as is the case with any large system, the needs are aplenty and the resources are few,” said P.S. Sriraj, director of the Urban Transportation Center at the University of Illinois Chicago.
Sriraj, who has a background in engineering and urban planning, said there are major infrastructure concerns here.
“Eventually, the infrastructure is going to give way, and it’ll give way when you least expect it, and that may not have anything to do with what the agency has or has not done,” he said.
The CTA did not immediately respond to requests for comment on concerns raised by Sriraj and Schwieterman.