McHenry is a station on Metra's Union Pacific Northwest Line, located in McHenry, Illinois. The station is the terminus of the McHenry Branch of the Northwest Line; inbound trains operate as far as Ogilvie Transportation Center in Chicago. The station is also the only station on the McHenry Branch after it splits off at Pingree Road, although the line previously extended to Williams Bay, Wisconsin. Proposals exist to expand service on the line by adding stations in Prairie Grove and Johnsburg. It is the fifth furthest Metra Station from Chicago after Harvard, Antioch, Woodstock, and Kenosha, at 50.47 miles (81.22 km). Most Northwest Line trains operate along the Harvard branch to Harvard or Crystal Lake rather than the McHenry Branch. The station only has one track and one platform due to the low number of trains that serve the station. Two storage tracks are used to store two trains during overnight hours as well as weekends and holidays. The station is located at grade level. There is one grade crossing of a road at the station, which is placed under a Federal Railroad Administration horn quiet zone. As of 2018, McHenry is the 198th busiest of the 236 non-downtown stations in the Metra system, with an average of 85 weekday boardings.
McHenry station
Metra is the primary commuter rail system in the Chicago metropolitan area serving the city of Chicago and its surrounding suburbs via the Union Pacific Railroad, BNSF Railway, and other railroads. The system operates 242 stations on 11 rail lines. It is the fourth busiest commuter rail system in the United States by ridership and the largest and busiest commuter rail system outside the New York City metropolitan area. In 2023, the system had a ridership of 31,894,900, or about 152,400 per weekday as of the fourth quarter of 2023. The estimated busiest day for Metra ridership occurred on November 4, 2016—the day of the Chicago Cubs 2016 World Series victory rally.
An outbound North Central Service train approaches Schiller Park station in June 2019, being led by an Ex-Amtrak EMD F59PHI
RTA EMD F40PH No. 123 crossing the Fox River in Elgin, Illinois, in 1981
Metra EMD F40C No. 614 in Chicago
Passengers near an inbound train at Geneva Station