Proto-Future and the Beginner's Guide to Model Railroading
Oct 16, 2026 · 18 min · 10 segments
Audio from the YouTube video series describing my journey to visit, ride, and bicycle every DMU system in the US. Video found at: https://www.youtube.com/@\G\IV…
But way up north of Dallas is Denton, Texas, which is home of the University of North Texas.
It is an adorable small town and a surprisingly high power little university, and it has been described to me as the only somewhat safe place to be a queer in all of Texas.
So it has a very outsized reputation and is very important to the region despite being rather small and very far away from either Dallas or Fort Worth as part of the larger Texas Metroplex, which you can see here.
It opened in June twenty eleven as the fifth DMU in the United States.
It is operated by Hertzog on behalf of DCTA or the Denton County Transportation Authority in Denton, Texas, northwest of Dallas.
It is so named because it is at the apex of the DFW Metroplex and if you look at the logo in the top left, you can see that they actually stylized it to represent what the A-Train does for the region, with the heavy line being the one going from top left to bottom right, or connecting Denton with Dallas, which is to the southeast.
It is thirty-four kilometers long and has six stations although two more are under consideration.
First, an infill station at a community college, and secondly a one station extension further south to downtown Carrollton, Texas, but we'll discuss that more later.
It gets two hundred and seventy-seven thousand riders a year for seven hundred and sixty a day, which works out to be twenty-two daily riders per kilometer or a hundred and twenty-seven per station.
Not overwhelmingly the highest ridership of all the systems that we've looked at so far, but there are probably a few reasons for this.
I think the RDCs themselves were actually hand-me-downs from Trinity Rail Express, which also started with RDCs between Dallas and Fort Worth.
So at least around twenty ten, it actually seemed to be a fairly common tactic to use RDCs for startup rail operations because as they say, bud don't break.
Similarly to the Sprinter, the A-Train is also a backbone of local transit, and all of the local bus routes have been specifically rerouted to serve the train station whenever they can because it is simply the fastest way around the region.
What's really unique about the A-Train is that to my understanding, I think it is the first ever DMU trail.
So while technically the Sprinter does have significant portions covered by a rail trail, I believe that was actually both coordinated by a separate entity and also grafted onto the system much later.
In fact, portions of it are still under construction.
However, with the A-Train, they intended from the start to have a bicycle trail run most of the length of the DMU and connect to most of the stations.
So in its own way, this tiny little system is actually a fairly revolutionary one.
So we're now starting to see Stadler's supremacy when it comes to supplying European style vehicles to American transit systems.
They are once again forty-one meters long, thirty-seven metric tons, produce eight hundred horsepower, go a hundred and twenty kilometers per hour and have a hundred and four seats on board.
Interestingly, because this opened only one year after Cap Metro Rail, it was built in the same order as Cap Metro Rail's original DMUs.
But way up north of Dallas is Denton, Texas, which is home of the University of North Texas.
It is an adorable small town and a surprisingly high power little university, and it has been described to me as the only somewhat safe place to be a queer in all of Texas.
So it has a very outsized reputation and is very important to the region despite being rather small and very far away from either Dallas or Fort Worth as part of the larger Texas Metroplex, which you can see here.
It opened in June twenty eleven as the fifth DMU in the United States.
It is operated by Hertzog on behalf of DCTA or the Denton County Transportation Authority in Denton, Texas, northwest of Dallas.
It is so named because it is at the apex of the DFW Metroplex and if you look at the logo in the top left, you can see that they actually stylized it to represent what the A-Train does for the region, with the heavy line being the one going from top left to bottom right, or connecting Denton with Dallas, which is to the southeast.
It is thirty-four kilometers long and has six stations although two more are under consideration.
First, an infill station at a community college, and secondly a one station extension further south to downtown Carrollton, Texas, but we'll discuss that more later.
It gets two hundred and seventy-seven thousand riders a year for seven hundred and sixty a day, which works out to be twenty-two daily riders per kilometer or a hundred and twenty-seven per station.
Not overwhelmingly the highest ridership of all the systems that we've looked at so far, but there are probably a few reasons for this.
I think the RDCs themselves were actually hand-me-downs from Trinity Rail Express, which also started with RDCs between Dallas and Fort Worth.
So at least around twenty ten, it actually seemed to be a fairly common tactic to use RDCs for startup rail operations because as they say, bud don't break.
Similarly to the Sprinter, the A-Train is also a backbone of local transit, and all of the local bus routes have been specifically rerouted to serve the train station whenever they can because it is simply the fastest way around the region.
What's really unique about the A-Train is that to my understanding, I think it is the first ever DMU trail.
So while technically the Sprinter does have significant portions covered by a rail trail, I believe that was actually both coordinated by a separate entity and also grafted onto the system much later.
In fact, portions of it are still under construction.
However, with the A-Train, they intended from the start to have a bicycle trail run most of the length of the DMU and connect to most of the stations.
So in its own way, this tiny little system is actually a fairly revolutionary one.
So we're now starting to see Stadler's supremacy when it comes to supplying European style vehicles to American transit systems.
They are once again forty-one meters long, thirty-seven metric tons, produce eight hundred horsepower, go a hundred and twenty kilometers per hour and have a hundred and four seats on board.
Interestingly, because this opened only one year after Cap Metro Rail, it was built in the same order as Cap Metro Rail's original DMUs.
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