A Sneak Peek at Geoffrey Baer's Upcoming Special
Daniel Hautzinger
September 19, 2019

Geoffrey Baer is hard at work with a production crew filming his next special, Chicago by L! Airing in March 2020, the show explores Chicago and its neighborhood via the CTA tracks that are its backbone, as well as the fascinating history of those railroad lines. Geoffrey was recently filming a segment along the Purple Line on a train from the CTA's Heritage Fleet. Built in 1959, the 6000-series cars feature crank-operated windows, manual doors, no air conditioning, and vintage ads and system maps. They are decorated on the outside with a red, white, and blue stripe that was added for the Bicentennial, and ran until late 1992, when they were retired.
While the production crew for Chicago by L was setting up for a day of shooting on the train cars at the Howard CTA rail yard, Geoffrey spoke to the special's producer, Eddie Griffin, about what it takes to put together a program like this. He also learned some CTA fun facts with Graham Garfield, a CTA employee and one of their "unofficial historians," who was dressed for the occasion in a vintage CTA uniform. Watch the Facebook Live of their conversations below (the action starts at about 1:56).