A glorious sight

I have been resistant on getting a smartphone.  The expense scares me as well as the attractiveness to thieves.  However, there are moments when one would have come in very handy.

Thursday 3 July saw me at Christ Church Cathedral (Episcopal) sing along with other adults the final Evensong service of the Royal School of Church Music Gulf Coast Summer Course for Girls.  Upon finishing, I walked south to Walker to catch my Westheimer-corridor bus (or buses as it turned out) home.

Along the way, I came across what will become the Central Station transfer points for the East and Southeast Lines.  Right then, I wished I had that phone-camera to catch that glorious snapshot.  The ultimate wisdom of Lee Brown who pushed through light rail come hell, high water, or Marvin Zindler's restaurant reports has yet to be proven one way or the other, but this much is sure: upper Downtown is changing and is changing fast.

It was brilliant seeing the Capitol and Rusk Central Station transfer canopies just about ready for business - well, about ready for the arduous testing that is to come.  Thanks to CAF's delays on getting new rail cars to us and other things going on, perhaps, I've heard through the grapevine the East and Southeast Lines may not go into revenue service until December of this year!

Testing the lines and testing the incoming rail cars will take months and months (can't leave any stone unturned), and integrating all this new stuff with the Red Line will be very interesting.  The next eighteen months will be for the entire agency, what with System Re-imagining and the opening of the two new rail lines, as busy and as hectic as any such span of time in its history.

But I am just pleased that things are progressing at all.  Whether light rail turns out to be a boondoggle or deus ex...train, doing nothing at all to help alleviate Houston's traffic woes would have been worse if only for the cultural damage to mass-transit doing nothing would have caused.

I cannot tell you how excited all this makes me once more for the re-imagined local bus network to go live next year!  By this time in 2015, the sleek, new network will be running along with our trains, and the Harrisburg overpass construction will be under way (we hope), setting the stage for the final portion of the East Line all the way to Magnolia Transit Center.

I am a happy camper and a happy transit rider.  And coming across all this Downtown rail progress, it was very tempting to step onto one of the station platforms replete with cones and barricades - perhaps I would be the first private citizen outside of METRO's purview to have done so.  I resisted and went on my merry way even happier than I already was in the wake of music and worship at Evensong.