Left Behind

Thanks to the incredbily high gas prices, today Amy and I began an effort to make use of the Trinity Railway Express (TRE) for our trips to Dallas. Fortunately, Amy lives a couple of exits down 360 from the Centreport TRE parka nd ride station, so she can use the TRE to travel to work in Dallas. She had used this option on this particular manner, so I decided to take the TRE to Dallas after work to meet her for dinner.

I boarded the TRE at the downtown Fort Worth ITC station, rode to Dallas and made the transfer to the DART light rail train without incident. I met Amy and we had a great dinner at the Texas Land and Cattle near her workplace. WE husteld back to the DART station but the light rail train seemed to take forever to get back to the Union Station TRE transfer point, arriving mere minutes after the 9:30 TRE train had departed. Thankfully it wasn't the last train of the night but we did have to wait some time for the 10:20 departure, the final train of the night that does not operate all the way to Fort Worth but instead terminates at Centreport.

The train departed right on schedule and we found ourselves in a completely empty coach, save for one other passenger seated at the opposite and and facing way from us, allowing us to get cozy for our trip through a largely dark trackside landscape to Centreport. With the darkness outside and the inside reflections on the window, it was difficult to tell that we were arriving at the Centreport station until the train lurched to a stop and the announcement was made. We scurried down the stairs of the bi-level cars just as the doors were closing and the train started moving again. We'd missed our stop, and so had the other passenger at the other end of the car who hadn't reached the doors at that end before they closed either. The train picked up speed as it headed west and the other passenger used the emergency call box to contact the crew, who was alittle annoyed at their presence. As the train stopped in a passing siding to let a coal train that had followed us out of DFW pass us, they came back through the cars looking for stragglers. Finding us, they maintained that they had been at centreport for two or three minutes, which was an obvious lie. I think that they knew they had cut the stop short thanks to the coal train following close behind and us and in part due to the fact that after making the stop and taking the train back to the maintenance facility they were free for their long weekend. Fortunately the TRE trains layover at a maintenace facility east of Centerport, meaning we would need to back through the Centreport station again as the crew put the train away for the night. Once the coal train cleared the main, the crew backed up to centreport and quickly dropped us off. It was a slight delay for us but a serious problem for the other passenger. He was a bus driver at DFW heading to the airport to begin his overnight shift and the delay meant that he missed the last connecting bus to take him to work. Not wanting him to have to walk the couple of miles to DFW, we gave him a lift in the Mini over to the airport and he was very thankful.

Probably my most eventful commuter train ride ever.