Many hotels are in walking distance, and two hotels are literally next to the station (La Quinta and Courtyard by Marriott, see below).We may earn a small commission from links on this page. This website is reader supported and not affiliated with Amtrak. Plus, it is in walking distance to the downtown historic district, convention center and the location of President John F. The 1916 building has connections to Amtrak’s Texas Eagle trains, DART light rail, Trinity Railway Express commuter trains to Fort Worth and local buses. This one is running on a Blue Line routing.The Dallas Amtrak Station, also called the Eddie Bernice Johnson Union Station, is in downtown Dallas at 400 S Houston Street. Your basic DART LRV #142 trundles down the Downtown RoW. I will have later posts on my ride on TRE and the McKinney Ave Trolley line. I was unable to explore the southern end of the system due to time constraints. In my travels on DART I route out to both Plano and Garland. No wonder US&S has a reputation for really gouging folks who contract them for a signaling system. One odd thing is that they use blanked light modules as spacers on the signal masts so you get something like L/S/S/L/L/L/S/S/L/L/L with L's being lamps and S being spacers. In the tunnel they use the transit style heads with LED lamps and on the main lines they use US&S modular stack lights. DART uses equipment from Union Switch and Signal. DART also had a an approach diverging aspect with a flashing yellow light. At interlockings DART uses the NYCS route based aspects with the top head indicating the route and the bottom the block status of the route. All of the lines are bi-directional, so this means back-to-back block signals on the main line. DART still suffered from a lack of traffic light preemption in the downtown, but that was one of the few flaws.ĭART has chosen to stick with wayside automatic block signaling. In Baltimore those folks just sit around and watch. However they are faster (65mph vs 55mph) and the operators don't pull up to the mini-hi platform so the front door is usable (Hello MTAM, are you listening?) When a handicapped passenger was on the min-hi, if there was a supervisor or ticket inspector on the train that person would assist the T/O in preparing the mini-hi flap thing. The DART LRV's are basically just like the Baltimore cars with hi-level seats, articulated design and they ran in two car trains. If you wanted a Day Pass to cover your trip on TRE the cost rose to only $4.50. While you could buy a single trip ticket, the TVM's didn't even talk about them or list them as an option. The fares are bone cheap, I think a full system day pass was something like $2.50. My hotel room overlooked the Pearl St station and even into the late hours of the night there always seemed to be a train either coming or going. Boy was I surprised when I found a Light Rail that was leaps and bounds better than Baltimore's and far faster than all of the old school systems in Philly, Boston and San Fran.ĭART is a wonderful system for both riders and railfans. Poor service outside of rush hours, early closing hours, awful Sunday service, LRV's sharing the RoW with pickup tracks, routes that can't compete with spral and don't take people where they want to go, etc. Traveling to a Red State I was expecting a generally hopeless transit system. Back in late April I was sent to a conference in Dallas, TX and I had the privilege of riding their DART light rail system.
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