The O’Hare Flyer wants to make the trip from downtown to O’Hare Airport 15 minutes, every time.

It’s a privately funded, $2B+ battery-electric train that would run from a new station west of the Old Post Office straight to O’Hare’s Terminal 2, with a target opening in 2031. If it works, it will be the first dedicated airport express train in the US.

I sat down with CEO and co-founder Dave Lundy to talk about why this attempt is different from the ones that failed before it, how the money comes together, and what it takes to get big things built in Chicago.

DL: Most developers make a big splashy announcement and then try to figure it out. We spent three years on this before going public: engineering, rail agreements, partnerships. We don’t want another failed attempt in Chicago. Tunneling under a city with lots of utilities and a high water table from Lake Michigan is hard. Our project uses proven technology and existing freight routes that are mostly unused. It’s a project we can actually deliver.

DL: They just don’t know our project. My co-founder Mark Wahlgren is a 50-year rail veteran who ran capital projects for Amtrak, and he found a way to give us 100% end-to-end control of our line.

We use the existing right of way from CSX, CN and Union Pacific, but we’re replacing every inch of track with new continuous rail built for a European-style train. No freight interactions, no interfering with Metra. Show up at the station at :00, :15, :30 or :45, and there will be a train waiting to get you to O’Hare in 15 minutes.

DL: It’s built with private funds. We’re in the middle of a raise now, and our first institutional round is in the spring.

The early money was all Chicago, and the next round will be primarily Chicago too, though we’ve had interest from sovereign wealth funds and the coasts.

On the back end, a federal program called RRIF takes out the construction loan. Those aren’t grants. They’re loans we pay back, up to 75 years at Treasury rates. So the project has to pencil out on fare revenue, and because it’s a straightforward 20-mile line, it does.

Chicago moves the country.

We’re the hub of the nation's rail network, a freight capital, a transit city, and a place where winter decides what technology actually works.

On Thursday, Nov 12th, I'm hosting Chicago Builds: Third Rail, a summit on how people and goods move through this city.

Panels will cover autonomy, freight, policy, micromobility, and rail.

More to come.

SuperCompute is the biggest high-performance computing conference in the country, and it’s coming to Chicago next month.

The weekend before it starts, we're hosting a hackathon with CIQ, Nvidia, Vast Data, and more.

The CIQ Supercomputing Local AI Hackathon will run from Friday, Nov 13 at 5pm to Sunday, Nov 15 at 4pm. Each team will legit hardware and the challenge is to build a real AI workload that uses the whole cluster, then show what the extra compute unlocked.

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[Creator Lab] Creators After Hours: Portfolio Night

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Grok Bot Meetup Chicago

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