Metra, the Chicago-area commuter railroad, has ordered eight battery-electric trainsets that can run 45 to 65 miles on a charge, and the first of them has been put on public display in Chicago. The trains come from Stadler, the Swiss manufacturer, and are built on its FLIRT platform. They are intended for one short stretch of Metra’s Rock Island District, where a battery can do the job that a diesel locomotive does now.
Metra’s executive director, Jim Derwinski, called the order a first for the country and said Metra will be the first in the United States to have battery-powered passenger vehicles, as Electrek quoted him. The claim is Metra’s own, and it concerns passenger trains in regular commuter service rather than test units or demonstrators, a distinction that decides whether the first-in-the-country label holds up.
Range, charging time and seats
The figure that defines the project is the battery range. Each trainset can travel 45 to 65 miles between charges, Electrek reported, and a recharge from 20 percent to 80 percent takes about 30 minutes. Trains magazine gave the charging window as 20 to 30 minutes when the contract was announced, so the half-hour figure sits at the upper end of the estimate Metra gave at the time, and the range is a band rather than a single guaranteed number.
A two-car set seats 112 passengers; one trailer car makes it 158. The cars are single-level and open from end to end, which lets passengers walk the length of a set, and they have low-level boarding, ADA-compliant lifts, open gangways between cars, bike and luggage racks and USB outlets.
The Beverly Branch assignment
The route is the Beverly Branch of the Rock Island District, 16.4 miles between La Salle Street station and Blue Island, according to Railway Age. A round trip is roughly 33 miles, which sits comfortably inside the low end of the stated range and leaves the battery a margin, an important point because lithium-ion capacity falls in cold weather. The sets carry underfloor heating in boarding areas, extra insulation and sealed machine rooms meant for Chicago winters, the trade coverage says.
Recharging happens at yards and terminals from existing 480-volt connections, and regenerative braking returns some energy as the train slows, Railway News reported. That arrangement is the appeal of a battery train on a short branch: no wire has to be strung along the right of way, and the diesel exhaust and engine noise that Metra says it wants to retire go away at the station platform.
Stadler’s North American chief executive, Martin Ritter, described battery-electric rail as an increasingly attractive solution for cutting emissions across the continent. The same approach is already carrying passengers in Germany, where the FLIRT Akku version entered service in 2023 on routes that are only partly electrified, which means the Chicago sets are an American adaptation of a design with some service history behind it, not an untried prototype, even if the American regulatory and weather conditions are new to it.
Contract, funding and delivery
Metra’s base order for the eight two-car sets is $154 million, with options worth up to $181.4 million for eight more sets and 32 trailer cars, per Railway Age. A $169.3 million federal Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality Improvement grant covers 80 percent of the costs, and Illinois supplies the 20 percent local match through its PAYGO program. First deliveries are expected in 2027 and 2028, the Railway Gazette noted, from Stadler’s Salt Lake City plant. Because the federal grant covers the base order and part of the options, the 20 percent state share is the portion of the bill that falls on Illinois, and any trainsets beyond the first eight would need their own funding decisions.
Derwinski said when the contract was signed that the purchase “demonstrates Metra’s commitment to cleaner power, to quieter trains, and to thinking outside the box.”
The railroad has also said the equipment would let it run more frequent service on the branch than the diesel locomotives and older cars it replaces, though no timetable has been published. At the exhibition announcement, Derwinski said Metra was excited to bring the technology, with its efficiency, flexibility and reliability, to Chicago. Those three words carry the operational bet: a train that charges in half an hour at a terminal and turns around on schedule is only useful if the yards and terminals have the power connections in place before the first set arrives, and the sources reviewed do not say when that charging infrastructure will be finished.
After the exhibition, the trainset heads to the Federal Railroad Administration’s test center in Pueblo, Colorado, the Daily Herald reported, before it can enter passenger service. What that testing finds about winter range on a 33-mile round trip will decide how much of the 45-to-65-mile claim survives a Chicago January.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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