What this site is
chicagotrain.org is an independent guide to the Chicago ’L’: its eight lines and 144 stations. It is not CTA’s website and it is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Chicago Transit Authority: we do not sell fares, we cannot load a Ventra card and we cannot handle a refund or a complaint. For any of that, CTA and Ventra are the people to contact.
What we do is put in one place a page for every line and station, fares and the Ventra card, schedules, a route planner and a service status board, written to be read on a phone on the platform. The site is funded by advertising.
What the October 2026 review found
On October 11, 2026 we checked every page against CTA’s own data, and some things had to change.
Hours. Six Green and Orange Line stations — Oak Park, Ridgeland, Austin, Central, Halsted and Pulaski — were shown as open 24 hours, because they share a name with Blue Line stations that are. They are not: their first and last trains now come from CTA’s schedule. Overnight trains on the Red and Blue lines run about every 15 minutes (15–20 on the Blue), not every 8–10.
Places and names. Our “downtown to Wrigley Field” route sent you to the Blue Line’s Addison station, three miles from the ballpark; it is the Red Line’s Addison. The White Sox park is now Rate Field. The Yellow Line does enter Chicago — Howard is in the city; what makes it unique is that it never reaches the Loop. And Howard is the northern end of the Red Line only; for the Purple and Yellow lines it is the southern end.
State/Lake. The station is closed for rebuilding until 2029, yet its page still offered transfers and a fare. It now points riders to Clark/Lake and Washington/Wabash.
What is live and what is not
The service status board is the one live part of the site: our server reads CTA’s customer alerts for each line, and every page reads from that answer, so no page load goes to CTA and no access key reaches your browser. If CTA’s feed stops answering, the board shows the last reading or steps aside.
Everything else — first and last trains and how often trains come — is CTA’s published schedule, and it is labeled as a schedule.
Where each fact comes from
Lines, stations, first and last trains and frequencies: CTA’s GTFS schedule feed, checked on October 11, 2026.
Accessibility: the City of Chicago open-data ’L’ stops dataset.
Fares, passes and Ventra: CTA’s fares pages. The 2026 fare increase CTA announced in 2025 was dropped; fares are unchanged.
Photographs: Wikimedia Commons, credited on each image.
When we get it wrong
We fix it and we say what was fixed — this page is the example. Where this site and CTA disagree, CTA is right. If something does not add up, write to [email protected].
Who is behind this site
This site is run by the team at GoRandom, a small group based in the Basque Country in Spain who do two things that go together better than they sound: travel, and build websites.
Chicago is not yet one of the cities we have set foot in — we are up to twenty and we move slowly. We would rather say so than pretend otherwise: what you read here does not come from our memories, it comes from what the operator publishes and from checking work we can show you.
The other half of what we know how to do is web development, and this site is the excuse to put the two together. We do not leave it sitting there: every fare and every timetable carries its source and the date we checked it, and they get revised when the operator changes something. The last thorough revision was on October 11, 2026, when every line and station page was checked against CTA’s schedule feed, its fares and its customer alerts.
He decides what goes up, checks the data before it does, and answers the email. If you find a fare that has expired or a timetable that no longer holds, there is a specific person to write to.