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[quote user="pkazmir"] Does anyone know why there are double signals (like one would usually see when approaching the entrance to a siding) just to the northwest of the Crystal Falls road crossing? There's no siding there, and it's been bugging me trying to figure out why the second signal. The next block up does protect a siding and it also has two signals. Okay, railfan question aside, I have to say I'm very disappointed with the implementation of Austin's light rail so far, most notably in the schedule. In a town that prides itself in downtown night life, and has it's light rail station two blocks from the epicenter of that scene, there's no light rail at night? On weekends? Seriously? And in addition to that, I wanted to take the train downtown (I live in Leander) for a conference that's going to be at the convention center...but I'll have to leave my home 45 minutes earlier than if I were to drive (because the train frequency is so low). I don't know enough about the history of the light rail in Austin to do anything by speculate, but it seems like a) sharing the rails with the freight trains is hamstringing light rail in Austin, and b) someone watered down the proposal so that they could make the price tag small enough and then realized they watered it down too much and was stuck. (Another example is 6 trainsets for 5 schedule slots.) Well, my two cents. I'm still excited about it coming online finally, and I will end up riding the train at some point, I'm sure. And I hope that it's successful enough to expand and blossom into what it truly could be.[/quote]   Capital Metro will only run the commuter trains during the morning and evening rush hours because of demand and cost constraints.  The demand for commuter rail in Texas, outside of the rush hours, is low.  Hopefully, as more people in the Austin area come to view commuter rail as a viable option to go downtown or to other points served by the rail line, they will create a demand for expanding the service. Although the equipment is different, the Capital Metro Red Line (Austin to Leander) is similar to the Trinity Railway Express (TRE) operation between Dallas and Fort Worth.  It too started with a limited schedule, which was expanded as the market demand for the service grew.  The TRE has trains in the evening and on Saturdays, with special trains to events scheduled for the American Airlines Center near downtown Dallas.  A major stumbling block to expanding the service is cost.  I don't have the numbers for the Red Line, but the TRE numbers are probably a good indicator of the costs associated with the Red Line.  TRE riders required an average subsidy of $6.33 per trip in FY08.  The subsidy for rush hour commuters would have been less; the subsidy for off-hours users would have been more.  In any case, the required subsidy is high and will constrain expanding the service, especially in a tough economy.   Several years ago I was able to get DART to give me the rider figures for the TRE.  They probably have changed since then, but the results confirmed that the trains are heavily patronized during the rush hours, but lightly used during off-hours.  The load factor from CenterPoint to Dallas during the rush hours was more than 80 per cent, but overall the load factor was approximately 35 per cent.  Some of the early morning and late night trains had a load factor of less than 10 per cent.
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