One piece of good rail news for the area did emerge yesterday – the Trinity Railway Express is getting $7.2 million to double-track the line between the CentrePort and West Irving stations.  The TRE’s already done a good amount of converting their line from single to double track, so this will really bring it all together.

What good does the TRE double tracking get us?  Robert Wilonsky in the Dallas Observer’s Unfair Park blog has a nice summary – more efficiency for the Texas Eagle, along with the potential for expanded capacity and service (including Sunday service) on the TRE:

So, then, simple question: Why the need for the expansion from one track to two? Well, says Lyons, “Amtrak’s on the Union Pacific corridor, and that’s a real busy corridor. They’d like to move to our corridor, and a lot of the freight lines would like them to move to our corridor. We really can’t have them do that now — we don’t have the room. But by adding that second track, there’s room for them to bring their trains onto the track. Also, itcould make it possible for us to expand TRE service. One reason we can’t run Sunday service on a regular basis is, when a lot of the track is single track, you need to be able to work on it. This gives you flexibility.”