The pile-driving started in May. Metra, the Chicago commuter rail operator, has begun the largest single rail-bridge replacement in its history: 11 timber-and-steel bridges along the Union Pacific North Line, some of them more than 120 years old, being torn out and rebuilt as part of a $337 million package that anchors Metra’s 2026 capital program.
These aren’t headline bridges. Most riders cross them at the back end of a commute without noticing the structures underneath. But the UP North line carries about 26,000 weekday boardings and the bridges in question include three water crossings over the North Branch of the Chicago River. Several have been on Metra’s annual bridge inspection condition list at “fair” rating with documented timber-deck deterioration. The agency’s federal Bridge Replacement Program funding application, approved in late 2024, gave Metra the cash to do the work as a single coordinated package instead of replacing them one at a time over a decade.
What the Metra Bridge Rebuild Actually Replaces
Eleven through-girder and deck-girder bridges between Lake Bluff and Kenilworth are scheduled for full superstructure replacement. The original structures date to between 1899 and 1923. Metra’s contracting strategy splits the work into two design-build packages: a southern package covering six bridges south of Glencoe under Lunda Construction, and a northern package of five bridges under Walsh Construction. AECOM is owner’s engineer and lead designer on both packages, with FX Collaborative consulting on the urban-design treatment of the bridges that span village business districts in Glencoe and Winnetka.
The work plan is built around weekend cutovers and a 14-month staged outage schedule. Metra will run bus bridges through the most disruptive weekends, and Union Pacific freight, which shares the corridor under a trackage rights agreement, gets diverted to the UP-Northwest line for the duration of each cutover. That coordination is the politically expensive part of the project. UP has been publicly cool to commuter-rail capital work on its corridors for years, and the trackage rights talks slipped the construction start date by roughly nine months.
The Bigger Picture for Chicago Rail Infrastructure
Metra’s 2026 capital plan totals roughly $850 million, with the UP North bridge package the largest single line item. The program also funds 11 station rebuilds, a fleet refresh adding 16 Stadler battery-electric multiple-unit cars on the Rock Island District as a pilot, and traction-power upgrades on the Electric District. The traction-power work is the quiet enabler for the eventual electrification expansion that Metra has been studying since 2022 but not yet funded for construction.
The federal funding window for projects like this is closing. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law’s advance appropriations expire at the end of FY 2026, and Metra’s bridge package made it through the application process with about six months of margin. Several other Chicago-area transit projects on similar timelines didn’t, and Metra has been clear in board materials that the 2027 capital plan will look very different if Congress doesn’t reauthorize the Federal-State Partnership Grant program at current levels.
The new bridges are designed for a 100-year service life with allowance for future heavier rolling stock. Metra’s design specifications also require all 11 bridges to clear PE-22 high-speed-rail loading, which keeps a future Amtrak Midwest Connect upgrade route through Glencoe technically alive even if there’s no funded plan to use it. The reporting came via Option Premier.