The Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport ranks 11th in the world in terms of passengers and allows passengers to access every major city in the continental United States within four hours. By the end of this year, residents and travelers will be able to get a direct, convenient ride between downtown Fort Worth and the airport with the opening of TEXRail.
Fort Worth Transportation Authority President/CEO Paul Ballard said, “It really connects the business community and everyone else in Fort Worth directly with the airport and the airport is the biggest economic development engine that we have.” He stressed, “It’s really critical that we’re connecting with it.”
TEXRail Comes to Fort Worth
FWTA took a year in 2015 to develop its master plan, which included a tremendous amount of public input. The blueprint for where public transportation should exist in the Fort Worth region began its rollout in 2016.
“Even though it’s essentially just the city of Fort Worth that supports us,” explained Ballard, “we know that the demand for transportation, roads, whatever, does not end at municipal boundaries.
“… We have unbelievable growth here; that’s really the urgency that drives the board here at the transit authority to moving forward on getting TEXRail done on schedule and getting the master plan funded because we know that there are hundreds of thousands of people moving here over the next few years and we don’t have any place to put them.
“Our roads are already congested and we’ve got to have these alternative ways of moving people; that’s why we have such a sense of urgency in what we do.”
The TEXRail line will be about 27 miles, operating on existing tracks of Fort Worth & Western, Burlington Northern Santa Fe, Union Pacific railroads and the former Cotton Belt route, now owned by Dallas Area Rapid Transit. The project includes nine stations and a new maintenance facility on the north side of Fort Worth.
The maintenance facility is expected to be dedicated in April, with all the trains being move in there at that time. Ballard said, “We’ll potentially be running trains on the line in April to start to break them in for employee training to make sure that everything is just right. We’ll still have some aspects under construction, but we’ll be able to run the trains …”
The maintenance facility will allow them to store all eight trains they’re acquiring, as well as a pit and scaffolding to service the vehicles. The maintenance facility will house the offices for the operations and maintenance staff.
Herzog Transit Services will operate and maintain TEXRail. Ballard said Herzog currently operates FWTA’s Trinity Railway Express, which is owned and operated with DART. “They’ve been the operator for TRE for 20-plus years,” he said. “We were able to negotiate a very good contract with them to work directly for us in operating TEXRail.
“There will be some economies of scale. While each railroad will have its own manager from Herzog, we’ll be able to share resources. It’s a win-win having the same company managing the two railroads.”
Two of the larger hurdles to the project, Ballard said, were when they reached agreements with the five railroads they share tracks with and getting a contract signed so they can get the positive train control done.
“The importance of it [PTC] … one company that essentially does that and they’re stretched thin.” Ballard continued, “We had to work very hard to get our agreement, so we signed an agreement with them in December of 2017, which will allow us to stay on schedule to have positive train control implemented on both Trinity Railway Express and TEXRail, consistent with the requirements of the law.
“We took advantage of the timing and we’re essentially doing the two railroads combined, as one positive train control contract.”
For both, Ballard gave insight on how they navigated through both of those processes. “No. 1, start early,” he said. “Two, build relationships with the people you’re trying to work with. I think, particularly with the five railroads, we basically had to get the five railroads to have confidence in us, that we were competent, that we knew what we were doing, that we would work with them, and that we would not endanger their business models.” He continued, “That can only happen over a period of time through regular interaction amongst the professionals on both sides. That takes time to do.”
He applied the same process to working to get PTC. “They needed to get comfortable that they were in fact dealing with a transit authority that understood its role, that has competent people dealing with the first negotiations and then secondly, the installation and operations.”
He stressed in both cases, “Start early and get to know people you are working with.”
