Photo: Jim Mahoney/Staff Photographer
A Dallas Area Rapid Transit police car blocked a track crossing Tuesday as a light-rail train sat stopped along Scyene Road. For the first time, DART was forced to close the entire light-rail system as a result of severe weather.
Photo: Andy Jacobsohn/Staff Photographer
A pedestrian navigates frozen DART tracks at Pearl Station in City Center on Tuesday. The ice storm struck more quickly and intensely than transit officials expected.
DART loses weather gamble, with light-rail frozen out of service
By MICHAEL A. LINDENBERGER
Transportation Writer
Published 01 February 2011 10:51 PM
Dallas Area Rapid Transit bet big that its trains would avoid being frozen out of service Tuesday morning, and it lost.
As news of the coming ice storm galvanized transportation planners Monday across North Texas, DART officials said they would be ready, and, if necessary, would run empty trains all night long to keep the rail system from freezing.
But they never did. DART officials believed that the worst of the storm wouldn’t arrive until after most trains were already on the tracks, warmed up and ready for morning service. So they kept to the agency’s regular weekday schedule.
That decision proved to be a bad one, when temperatures plummeted shortly before 4 a.m., turning the rain to blanketing layers of ice just as the rail yards were beginning to stir.
Some early trains made it out of the yard, only to stall with passengers on board. Most others simply never got going. A handful of the switches on the tracks froze solid, and ice encased overhead power lines across the 72-mile rail network.
As a result, all light-rail service was suspended through the morning and didn’t resume until midafternoon. It operated on a reduced schedule Tuesday evening.
It was the first time in DART’s almost 15 years of train service that the entire light-rail system was suspended.
“It was an operational failure,” said Ray Noah of Richardson, DART’s longest-serving board member. “You and I both know that the warnings that were coming down were calling for severe conditions — I think the words I saw were ‘radical drops in temperature.’”
But DART president Gary Thomas said a test of the rails that began at 2 a.m. showed conditions were normal, with a light rain falling and above-freezing temperatures.
That jibed with the agency’s expectations that the coldest weather wouldn’t arrive until after 6 a.m., he said.
Fast and intense
Temperatures instead began to plummet before 4 a.m., turning the rain to deep layers of ice.
“This storm came in so quick, and the timing was unfortunately just at the right time that it made it very problematic for us,” he said. “The temperatures dropped very quickly.”
He said crews arrived to begin moving the trains from the rail yard onto the tracks about 3:30 a.m.
“It takes a while to get all the service out of the yard,” Thomas said. “When we started pulling the trains out, between 4 and 4:30, that’s about when the storm hit. But I couldn’t pull out any faster.”
The storm was so intense and the temperatures dropped so fast, he said, that he’s not sure that the rails would have remained ice-free, even if he had moved trains onto the tracks before the storm.
“Hindsight is always easier,” he said. “But I can’t even say for sure with hindsight that it would have been better. It might have made a difference. But you can’t really know now. Given the intensity that it came at us this morning … who is to say it wouldn’t have frozen anyway?”
DART’s senior vice president of operations, Todd Plesko, said he has worked at other agencies that did run trains all night to prevent freezing, but that it didn’t always work.
“We routinely operate trains all night when we are certain we are going to get freezing rain,” he said. “Even when we did this, about half the time we were unable to keep the trains operating everywhere because the freezing rain came down too hard and too fast.”
Running trains every 15 minutes overnight would have cost DART at least $55,000, he said.
Extra crews
Transportation agencies throughout North Texas had been on high alert for the severe weather, thanks in part to reporters from around the world being on hand Tuesday as events for Sunday’s Super Bowl in Arlington began in earnest.
Texas Department of Transportation officials brought dozens of workers Monday night from as far as Amarillo to help crews treat the roads for ice. The North Texas Tollway Authority mobilized its entire maintenance staff.
Michael Morris, transportation director for the North Central Texas Council of Governments and transportation chief of the Super Bowl host committee, said both those agencies assumed the weather would turn bad by 3 a.m. and had crews begin work by midnight.
Other transit agencies deal with cold routinely.
In Denver, transit officials operate 157 light-rail vehicles with overhead power systems similar to DART’s. For the past two days, that city has been inundated with ice and below-zero temperatures.
Daria Serna, spokeswoman for the transit agency, said the trains haven’t missed a single stop because of the cold — and that the weather there has never caused the light-rail service to be suspended.
“Never,” she said.
When temperatures fall in Denver, she said, trains are run every 30 minutes all night long to keep the switches from freezing on the tracks.
In addition, the agency has equipped some of its rail cars with heated carbons — the piece of equipment that touches the overhead power lines. Others have small metal blades that allow the unheated carbons to act as ice-cutters as they move along the power lines.
“Our operations manager tells me he won’t even let the cars sit in the rail yard in cold weather,” she said. “He keeps them constantly moving.”
The stranded
Dallas resident Stan Aten, a daily DART rider, said he’s frustrated that cold weather knocked out the service Tuesday.
“Why does DART seem to have so much trouble with ice and their switches on the light rail? Ice is a regular part of winter in North Texas. … You design a system for the worst possible outcomes to keep your system moving.”
Meanwhile, the light-rail shutdown forced Sam Francis to take two buses from the DART station on Ledbetter in south Oak Cliff to Union Station downtown.
There the Lancaster resident, an engineer for Oncor Electric Delivery, planned to take a train to Fort Worth for a meeting with other members of the North American Electric Reliability Corp.
“We thought we’d have it in a warmer climate,” he said of the gathering.
But the Trinity Railway Express also wasn’t running, leaving Francis and about 15 other would-be riders waiting uncertainly for their next move.
“I’m going to work,” said Francis, sitting on the floor, engaged with a laptop and an apple. “As long as I have a plug, I can go all day.”
Thomas said Tuesday that he’s asked his staff to look at equipment changes that might make sense and to review how agencies like Denver’s handle cold conditions.
He also said DART patrons should know that the agency is working hard to keep service going, despite difficult circumstances.
“This morning it didn’t work like it was supposed to, and surely there are a lot of disappointed people — including me,” Thomas said. “We hope tomorrow will be better. There are a lot of people working very hard right now to make that happen.”
As of Tuesday night, DART officials said they expected to run light-rail service on all three lines Wednesday, but with trains arriving only every 20 minutes.
“We don’t expect any more precipitation, so we think the (light-rail power lines) should be fine,” Thomas said, though he warned that riders can expect delays if conditions are bad.
AT A GLANCE
DART service on Wednesday
Bus: Regular schedule, but expect delays if roads are icy
TRE: Regular schedule
Light rail: Open but trains running less frequently than usual