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.”
When it came to PTC and the shared railroad, they had to be able to communicate with the other railroads. “Anyone operating on either TEXRail or TRE, they have to be a part of the positive train control,” said Ballard. “We have a short line railroad that operates on the TEXRail line and they only run three or four trains a week. But what we’re doing as part of our project is that we are going to equip four of the short line railroad locomotives with the onboard positive train control equipment so that they will be part of the PTC.
The trains for TEXRail are Stadler FLIRT DMUs, with assembly being done in Salt Lake City, Utah. FWTA Vice President TEXRail Robert Baulsir Jr. said, “ … when we talk about the technology that we’re putting in place here; it’s important to know that it’s field tested, which gets us to be really comfortable. We’re buying a vehicle from a company that has built thousands of them – literally – and it’s been field-tested and it’s going to work well.”
One of the reasons they picked the FLIRT, he said, was that it’s all-aluminum. The lightweight vehicle has lower fuel consumption, is considerably quieter than a regular locomotive and also accelerates and decelerates faster, which gives them reduced times on the line.
Baulsier added, “I think that’s big for this particular vehicle. It’s going to be more efficient to operate and maintain.”
TEXRail will also have a quiet car on the train. Where there was a first class section in the European designs and made that a quiet car. Ballard said, “We will have a very nice quiet car on ever train and we think that’s a key aspect of it … you can quietly read or take a nap or whatever …”
Where the Switzerland vehicles had ski racks, at TEXRail they’re putting in bike racks. Every train will also have a fully accessible restroom, level boarding, luggage racks, reading lights, USB charge ports, seat-back trays and some areas will have tables.
The cars are open gangways and have large windows to give a light, open feel. When the trains get to one end or the other, the engineer can walk through the DMU to the opposite end, get in the other engineer’s compartment and head the other direction.
With the anticipated growth in the region, plans for increasing capacity are in place. “We’ve looked at different ways to increase capacity on our line and there are really a couple of different ways that we can do that,” said Baulsier.
They have in the contract with Stadler, the option to add an additional passenger car to the train to make it longer but, Baulsier said, if they would do that, platforms would have to be extended, the bigger trains would need to fit in the maintenance facility, and looking at it, they realized, he said, it would make a lot more sense to add vehicles. “We wouldn’t have to extend the building where the equipment maintenance facility is … we don’t have to add more power units to them because it’s got this bigger load for air conditioning and uphill grade.
“If we add vehicles, we could lower the time between trains, better headways … We’re too physically constrained where some of the platforms are, because they’re only so long; we want all the doors on the platform open.
“It was quickly evident [adding vehicles] eliminates all the problems and gives us additional benefits.”
Service Expansion
Since developing the master plan, FWTA has been looking for local government to provide financial support to expand its service.
“The history here is that the sales tax has always funded public transportation with no money coming from the general fund of the city,” explained Ballard. “We came close to changing that, I mean really close, and we’ll make it this year. But we generate about 70 million in sales tax.”
In comparison, he said DART, with its sales tax collection, collect more than half a billion dollars a year.
With population growth, Fort Worth and Tarrant County are going to be the same size in population perspective, as Dallas and Dallas County in the next 10 to 12 years, Ballard said. “We have so much we need to do,” he stressed.
As FWTA Chief Operating Officer Mike Birch explained, they’re attacking the city by quadrants. Last spring, they expanded in the north quadrant; it was self-funded through growth in the sales tax, as the north is one of the fastest growing parts of the country. Sales tax growth is really strong and each year, exceeds what they budget for that revenue item significantly.
Over the years, the service in the north had been scaled back and was more of a coverage-based layout but, Birch said, they’re trying to find a way for everyone in the area to be able to get to the bus and that resulted in a very complicated route structure.
The priority now is looking for opportunities to keep the funding coming in so that they can grow into the other quadrants.
“We had one particular route that went four different directions depending on what time of day you were catching the bus,” he said. “By streamlining those down, then we created some cross-town routes.
“We saw an immediate growth of the north quadrant. We think we can see more growth once we can get that quadrant connected to a restructuring the rest of them so people don’t have to come all the way downtown to make a bus transfer.” He explained, “There will be major transfer points on each side of town so that if you want to go from the northwest to the southwest, you can do that without having to travel all the way down and all the way back out.”
In the north quadrant, they connected to Tarrant County College, which had not previously been served. “We worked out a plan where they’re going to subsidize their students and faculty’s rides on the service and … we’re going to connect all their campuses together through our network,” said Birch.
“We’re excited to be able to partner with them. In doing so, we’re touching the millennials, we’re touching the college students who may have grown up not familiar with the system by being able to take a bus from one campus to another to take a class.” Birch added, “… to be able to ride the bus is giving them great exposure so that maybe they’ll take the bus or the train for a regular trip.”
Most of the efforts in the north quadrant restructuring were straightening out the routes, allowing them to move quicker through high-density corridors at a faster rate. Birch said, “What we found was, that actually freed up resources that we could use for expansion in other areas.”
With funding an issue, Birch said they’re really trying to get the system as efficient as they can and in doing so, replacing some of the old service where demographics have changed, people have moved or origins of destination have changed. They’re focused on realigning the service to better serve where people really need to go.
“We’re really looking to increase ridership through increasing our frequency,” Birch explained. “We’re starting earlier, we’re ending later, and we’re improving weekend service as well.
“Our ultimate goal is to make it where Saturday and Sunday are on the exact same schedule; we just have weekday service and weekend service to make it as easy to use as possible.”
The quadrants have been prioritized by the history of the routes and where they’re serving. The north side was obviously a booming area for Fort Worth and it also had the most problems with the old route structure. The next quadrant they’re tackling is the west quadrant. Birch said they are making some improvements on the west quadrant in its next route-cycle change but they don’t have the funding to do the full expansion that they would like to at this time.
“We’re still very much engaged in trying to raise those funds,” said Birch. “If we get the master plan funded, at that point we would move well ahead with the west and move on to the other two quadrants.”
With TEXRail coming, Birch said they have a huge opportunity to connect to the new stations. There have been a lot of efforts to tie the bus and rail together in some of the new areas they are branching out to.
The Passenger Experience
The other piece they’re focusing on is improving the customer experience and Ballard said they’re doing a number of things in that realm. In the next year, FWTA is going to install 100 new passenger shelters throughout the bus network.
While they publish schedules everywhere, people want real-time information so they’re putting digital signs at some of the key stops. “It will ultimately be connected so it’s real time,” explained Ballard. “Initially it will be scheduled times from the time table, eventually it will be real time.
“… We find that people are coming to expect that. We’re trying to incorporate that type of technology in everything we do.”
FWTA currently has a pilot project of some real-time signage at its transfer stations. The Intermodal Transit Center has electric signage now and there’s electronic signage along the BRT route. The idea is, with a true CAD/AVL system, they will be able to offer more real-time signage at the major transfer points.
Birch said they have really invested in technology over the last few years and one they’re going to be purchasing this year is the new CAD/AVL system. He said, “We would like to do a full-blown CAD/AVL solution that allows us to not only provide real-time information … but to be able to do payment over your phone and then track all the metrics on our side.”
From his previous experience at IndyGo in Indianapolis, Birch said they were able to reap the benefits of great information of where people were getting on and off, allowing them to tweak the routes to match what the community does.
“And then you have a master plan to figure things out, you’re kind of able to do it on the fly once you see where people are getting on and off, automatic passenger counters link to the GPS system all the way down to the stop and route level to really track where people need the service,” Birch said. “Where it’s performing well and where we can take lower performing routes and either doing marketing campaigns to make people aware or change those routes into routes that have a higher frequency.”
FWTA uses the GoPass, operated out of DART. Birch said they would like to move to their own to have flexibility. They would like to integrate the current GoPass, which works on all FWTA’s modes, but it doesn’t have the ability to integrate with anything else.
“We have a very large investment in new fareboxes about a year ago,” said Birch. The Genfare fareboxes have the capability to do barcodes and cellphones for payment and he said they would like to integrate everything together for one smart app that allows the rider to do trip planning, track real-time information and pay for the trip.
“Eventually we’ll be moving in that direction,” he said.
