OTOL Missouri-Texas RailFest 2017 Homepage

OTOL Missouri-Texas RailFest (MTRF) 2017 was our summer railfan event centered on three major US cities, Kansas City, St. Louis, and Dallas. We rode the SOUTHWEST CHIEF, MISSOURI RIVER RUNNER, and TEXAS EAGLE, and also rode transit within all three cities. At the end, we took a Metra round trip in the Chicago area.

Main goals of this trip were to ride the RideKC Streetcar in Kansas City and the Metrolink Blue Line in St. Louis (only the Red Line existed when we were there back in 2005). In Dallas, for light rail only the Red Line & Blue Line existed in 2005. Since then, the Blue Line has been extended on both ends, and the Green Line and Orange Line have opened. We also experienced the Las Colinas People Mover in Irving. The McKinney Avenue heritage trolley (M-Line) has been extended closer to downtown on a full loop, and the modern Dallas Streetcar has also gone into service. We did the suburb-to-suburb commuter rail line known as A-Train round trip between Carollton to Denton, accessed by the DART Green Line. In Chicago, the one Metra line we had not yet ridden as a group was the UP-Northwest Line between Chicago and Harvard.