Two Stations, One Rail Line: Naperville's Commute Runs on the BNSF
The BNSF Line is Metra's busiest route, and Naperville's two stations — downtown and Route 59 — give the city two different doors into Chicago.
Naperville's commute to Chicago runs on steel. The city is served by two stations on Metra's BNSF Line — the Naperville station at 105 E. Fourth Avenue downtown, and the Route 59 station to the west — on the 37.5-mile route between Aurora and Chicago Union Station. The BNSF is Metra's busiest line, and Naperville's downtown stop is consistently one of the busiest stations in the entire system outside of downtown Chicago.
The downtown station, built in 1910, serves the city's core and also hosts Amtrak trains, making Naperville one of the few suburbs where a resident can board either a commuter train to the Loop or a long-distance train across the country from the same platform area.
Route 59 tells the other half of the story. Its large parking lots serve the subdivisions of Naperville's west side and the retail corridor along Route 59 itself, one of the region's most heavily traveled north-south arteries, where Naperville meets the Fox Valley Mall area at Aurora's edge. On weekday mornings the pattern is fixed: the corridor fills early, and the station lots fill with it.
For drivers, the alternatives frame every rush hour. I-88, the East-West Tollway, parallels the rail line across Naperville's north side and carries the region's heaviest suburban commute loads, while the BNSF tracks run a few blocks south of downtown. When the tollway slows, the train is the hedge — and on the worst mornings, platform crowds show that thousands of Naperville commuters have made the same calculation.
The evergreen advice holds in every season: the earliest trains and the Route 59 lots reward those who plan, downtown parking rewards those who arrive before the peak, and checking Metra's schedules before leaving remains the cheapest minute in the entire commute.