There are myriad pluses here for railroad passengers, as well as movie and architecture buffs. ![]() Elevators from street level to the Great Hall are planned by the end of 2017 if funding can be secured, he added. The filmmakers added the clock to create the railroad station setting and set a tense mood, Sanders said. Movie buffs will notice that certain features from the shootout scene - most notably a clock that Ness watched before the gunbattle - are absent. The rest of the old treads have been put in storage with other historic elements of the station, including porcelain sinks, walnut doors and brass door handles. A few treads are displayed at the foot of the south steps, alongside a flat-screen TV that has a time-lapse video of the renovation. Twelve percent of the risers were salvaged and reinstalled. The stairs still contain traces of the past. A color-matched grout fills grooves in the treads to prevent people from slipping. To prevent tripping, the ends of the treads are not rounded, or "bull-nosed" in architectural parlance. The stairs themselves replicate the materials of the original steps, albeit with a slight difference. Steel that supports the stairs has been reinforced. The new staircases, which opened last fall, strike an effective balance between respecting the past - a necessity because Union Station is an official city of Chicago landmark - and meeting today's needs, particularly the requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The treads - curvy, uneven and resembling undulating waves - were deemed a tripping hazard by city officials, prompting Amtrak to renovate them, said Paul Sanders, Amtrak's senior facilities manager at the station. Decades of footfalls had worn down the treads, originally 3 inches thick, to as little as 1 5/8 inches, Koroski said. ![]() ![]() The stairs were in bad shape before the $2.2 million revamp, which also renovated an identical staircase on the station's northern side. "We had a lot of people going, 'Where are the stairs? What are you doing with them?'" said architect Leonard Koroski, a principal at Chicago's Goettsch Partners, which is working with Amtrak on the Union Station revamp.
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