When is the last time you rode a South Shore train?

When did you take your first ride on a South Shore commuter train? And when was the last time you rode the all-electric interurban train to ...

anywhere? Both questions hopped aboard my mind while I stood on the upper platform of the Gary Metro train station during a morning rush hour. I watched hurried commuters heading to work in Chicago and excited kids on their way to a White Sox game. I remember the exhilaration of my first train ride to Chicago in the early 1970s with my family.

After the train arrived at the last station in the Windy City, I blew through the surrounding blocks to experience Chicago from the inside out. A magic shop. A greasy diner.

A skyscraper. I took it all in before returning to our home in Miller, a railroad town since its inception. The South Shore rail line has been a part of this Region's landscape for so long, since 1908, many of us forget it's there.

The fabled catenary commuter line not only connects Northwest Indiana to Chicago and South Bend, it also connects the past with the present. "I first rode it in the late 1950s when the cars were heated by wood-burning stoves," Bill Leavitt recalled. Rick Welton first rode the train in the late 1960s during his freshman year in high school.

"The French club went to Chez Paul Restaurant," he said. On the morning of Nov. 9, 1966, Tom Hoffman took the train from the East Chicago station to downtown Chicago to be sworn into the U.

S. Air Force before being shipped out by airplane to Amarillo, Texas. The.