Firestarter

Last night, I was poking around the web site for Metra, the Chicago commuter train system, trying to figure out if I wanted to go on a joy ride on one (or more) of their routes while I'm in Chicago next month. I realized that I had never taken the Metra Electric route, which uses different equipment than all the other Metra lines, and I ended up making preliminary plans to go for a ride on that line, trying to figure out if the schedules were such that I could ride on all three branches of the line without having to spend a long time hanging around on a station platform. (The answer: I could easily do two of the three branches, which I guess is good enough.)

And then, just now, I find out that last night, a bridge on the Metra Electric route caught fire and was totally destroyed, so there's not going to be any service on one of the branches for the foreseeable future. From looking at the pictures on the Chicago Tribune web site, the "foreseeable future" clearly includes the time I'm going to be in Chicago, because it looks like they're going to have to build a whole new bridge.