Dallas / Fort Worth and Me

A few weeks ago, I took a nice train trip to Fort Worth with my family. It’s wasn’t one of those purposeful jaunts; it was for entertainment, mostly, but there was a bit of education thrown in there too. Despite the fact that I’ve lived in Dallas for 14 years and DART has been available for most of that time, I’m a Texas boy through and through, and I prefer to gallivant about the D/FW Metroplex in my car. This being the case, I’m not as familiar with the system as I might be. I’ve taken the DART train Red Line from one end to the other (Plano to Westmoreland Road deep in Dallas), but I’d never been on the Blue Line from Garland, and I’d never taken the Trinity Railway Express to Fort Worth.

On August 10, I decided it was time to remedy that. The trip gave me an excellent opportunity to take some photos for this blog, and to give you a few pointers on what you can expect on such a trip. Over the next two blog entries, I’m going to describe the journey, and show you some of the sights.

The first stretch of the Fort Worth trip began at the train station in Garland, which I’ve already shown you here.  Our first task (once we’d finally found a place to park at the nearby transit station) was to troop over in the 100-degree heat and purchase our tickets from a machine. One great thing about getting around on DART is that it’s cheap. It only costs $4.50 to travel everywhere you want all day, anywhere on the DART and TRE lines. You’re even covered for the DART buses. I doubt you can even get to and from Fort Worth for as little as $4.50 in gasoline, so this was a real deal. In any case, it cost me $18 to purchase four tickets, which we then proceeded to use the hell out of. Be forwarned: if the ticket machine owes you enough money, your change will be returned to you in the form of dollar coins. From my twenty I got back a Susan B. Anthony and a Sacajawea. I like the fact that they’ve made the Sac dollars gold, but they’re still easy to confuse for a quarter, which I later did in Union Station in downtown Dallas. More on that later.

Anyhoo: we hopped the first train that was going in the right direction and went on our way. Here’s what the interior of a DART train looks like. Not too big, but nice and shiny.

I’ve alwys been gratified by the speed of the DART trains. When you get right down to it, they’re probably faster than driving, given all the lights, signs, and traffic you don’t have to worry about, and you have the freedom to read or snooze or, in my case, take pictures and edit a manuscript as you go. One thing they don’t have is power ports and electrical sockets, so the amount of work you’re going to get done on your handy laptop or PowerBook is limited to whatever your computer’s battery can handle. The same is true on the TRE.

By and large, the DART rail line is located above ground. My understanding is that the engineers would have liked to have made it mostly subterranean, but they were faced with a harsh reality: the Metroplex is mostly underlain by a mixture of really hard limestone, flint, and chalk. The limestone turned out to be three times harder than expected, so it would have cost three times more to build it underground; so they compromised. There’s a small stretch of underground tunnel a mile or so long between Mockingbird and Pearl Stations, just long enough for us to enjoy without feeling too claustrophobic. In the middle of it is Citiplace Station, our one and only subway station. We got off there for a bit. I was able to take this one photo on the platform before the DART police shut me down. No photos of the underground, they said. Pshaw.

Getting out of the station itself and into the Citiplace Building is a bit of an adventure, involving the tallest escalators I’ve ever seen and an elevator that goes up at a 45-degree angle. I think this is kinda neat, but you didn’t come all this way to see escalators and such, I suspect. But here’s something charming by way of decoration just above the station:

They have several sets of these tile decorations, all apparently designed by kids. Am I too easily entertained? Maybe. But I though it was cute.

If you don’t count our exploration of Citiplace, it didn’t take more than about 30 minutes to get from Garland to Union Station, which is located outside more or less at the foot of Reunion Tower. Union Station isn’t the end of the Red Line, but it’s the place where you have to catch the TRE to Fort Worth. Why the station’s Union and the tower (and stadium) are Reunion, I have no idea.

Anyway, when you get there, you have to do downstairs into a subway-like entrance to get to the Union Station waiting room, which is rather plain and what you’d expect, so I didn’t bother to take any pictures of it either inside or out. Except for one, because this one thing sure caught my attention. You see, there are a couple of soda machines (and a tiny water fountain) on one wall of the station. As I found out, those soda machines don’t take dollar coins (yeah, I thought it was a quarter), and as I also found out, they sometimes won’t take your dollar bills, either. Oh, and if you don’t have any change for the soda machines and it’s a hundred degrees outside? Too bad for you.

They really mean it, too. I decided that Union Station employees are, as one of my nieces used to say, butthead jerks. Thank goodness they didn’t charge for the water. Anyway, there’s your big lesson for today: take plenty of change into Union Station if you want a soda! You’ve got one option for relief just out front and across the street, though, if you’re really desperate.

So that was the first leg of our journey. In the interest of keeping these entries to a reasonable length. I’ll tell you all about the Fort Worth leg in the next entry. Try to contain your excitement until then, ‘k?

Bookmark to: