The Trinity Railway Express is a commuter rail line in the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex. It was established by an interlocal agreement between Dallas Area Rapid Transit and Trinity Metro. Each transit authority owns a 50% stake in the joint rail project and contractor Herzog Transit Services operates the line. The TRE began operating in December 1996. As of the fourth quarter of 2014, the TRE has an average weekday ridership of 8,200 passengers per day and is the fifteenth most-ridden commuter rail system in the United States. In 2014, the TRE carried 2,293,500 passengers. Before 2006, the TRE was typically shown as a green line on DART maps and therefore was sometimes referred to as the "Green Line," but this was not an official designation. In 2006, DART chose green as the color for its new light rail route, the. Since 2006, the TRE has been shown as a dark blue line on DART maps.
There are seven EMD F59PH IV locomotives that were acquired from GO Transit. The original numbers for these were #525, #527–528 and #565–568. These were overhauled in late 2010 by the Norfolk Southern Railway and RELCO Locomotive to meet EPA standards and renumbered 120–126.
Until 2011, the TRE fleet included diesel multiple units, in the form of 13 Budd Rail Diesel Cars built in the 1950s for Canadian Pacific Railway, Canadian National Railway and Boston & Maine. They were purchased used from Via Rail Canada in 1993. All were remanufactured by GEC-Alsthom in Montreal. They entered service in March and April 1997after trains leased from Amtrak and the Connecticut Department of Transportation temporarily provided initial TRE service when the RDCs were not ready in time for the inauguration of TRE service in December 1996and thereafter provided all service for the line's first two to three years. They remained in service for about 14 years, the last cars being taken off of TRE service in March 2011. In 2010–2011, 11 of the 13 cars were leased to Denton County Transportation Authority for operation on the A-train. They were returned in 2012 and placed in storage at the TRE shops in Irving, Texas. In spring 2017, 12 RDCs were sold via auction to AllEarth Rail, a Vermont-based private company that intends to use them to operate commuter rail service connecting the Vermont cities of Montpelier and Burlington. AllEarth subsequently resold two of the TRE cars to TriMet, of Portland, Oregon, before they had left Texas, and those two Dallas RDCs were moved in August 2017 from Texas to Oregon, where TriMet planned to use them on its WES Commuter Rail service. The other 10 RDCs were moved to Vermont the same month.
Train consist
Information from the Trinity Railway Express Each train includes at least one locomotive unit and one bi-level cab car. Typically, one or two additional coach cars are included between the locomotive and cab car. Each cab car has a restroom and passengers may move between cars during the trip. The trip from Union Station to T&P Station takes just over an hour, with scheduled trip times ranging from one hour, three minutes to one hour, eleven minutes. Track improvements are currently underway which should offer an improvement in travel times by double-tracking certain stations and sections of the route. Currently, portions of the route are single-track, requiring eastbound and westbound trains to meet only at certain points and requiring some eastbound trains to hold for 5–7 minutes to wait for a westbound train to get to the passing area.
