DART shows off massive downtown light-rail track replacement with time-lapse videos
Dallas Area Rapid Transit crews have spent the last few weekends replacing worn-out train tracks that date back to the halcyon days of the Macarena, which has necessitated parking its light-rail service — a necessary inconvenience, in other words. The work’s scheduled to wrap November 30 — though that’s a bit up in the air at the moment, given a forecast calling for 1-2 inches of rain on Saturday.
Anyway. DART’s been documenting these rail replacements, posting the results to YouTube and dispatching them to media. I didn’t pay much mind till I noted that the most recent entry found its way to Reddit, where it was enthusiastically greeted with reviews hailing it as “seriously cool” and “fantastic work” (if, that is, you turn down the sound, which is recommended with 94 percent of all YouTube videos). And, yes, by all means. Hail, hail the work of DART videographer Lupe Hernandez.
I asked DART spokesman Morgan Lyons for a little background on the time-lapse videos that were shot without the use of drones. (A camera was mounted on the Crowne Plaza on Elm Street.)
“This is a very important and complex project, and we wanted to document it,” he responded via email. “We like doing the videos because they help us make our story more accessible. Using the time-lapse approach helps us present to full scale of the effort without asking viewers to commit a whole lot of time.”
Not sure you’re going to need all 24 minutes. But worth most of ‘em. Lyons says at least one more’s on the way, because everyone knows you ain’t a franchise till you hit the trilogy mark.