I Have Waited for Every Train This Town Ever Promised Me

At 7:14 this morning I was standing on the Crestview platform holding a coffee, reading a laminated notice that said no trains would be coming. I already knew no trains would be coming. I went anyway, the way you drive past an ex's house. I wanted to see what the absence looked like up close.

It looked like a grackle on the tactile strip and a man in a lanyard checking his phone with the face of someone who hadn't read the laminated notice.

Here are the facts, plainly. MetroRail, the commuter line, is suspended Monday, August 24, through Thursday, August 27, for track work at the North Burnet/Uptown station, which is expected to open in 2027. Four days. Buses and patience are the official alternatives.

I'm not mad about it. Track work is track work. You can't build a station by wishing at it, although this city has tried, and I was there for most of the attempts. So while the grackle and I waited for nothing, I ran back through every train I've ever waited for in Austin. It's a longer list than you'd expect from a town that has barely had any.

The one that never stopped

The first train I waited on wasn't one you rode. It was freight, somewhere east of I-35, on a summer night when I was about nine, with the windows down in my uncle's Buick because the air conditioning had been "fixing to get fixed" since the Carter administration.

The arms came down, the bell went off, and we sat there. My uncle killed the engine to save gas, which made the car get hotter and let the bell get louder. I counted cars. Boxcar, tanker, boxcar, a flatbed with something under a tarp that I decided was a tank. I got to a hundred and something and lost count when a lightning bug landed on the dashboard.

That was the whole Austin train experience for years. A train was something that happened to you, at a crossing, while your thighs fused to vinyl. Nobody imagined getting on one. You just hoped it ended before your Blue Bell did.

The one we voted on

Then grown-ups started holding elections about trains, and I learned a new kind of waiting.

Light rail went to voters in 2000 and lost narrowly. I remember the yard signs better than the arguments. Signs for, signs against, signs on the same block, sometimes on the same lawn, because one roommate had opinions and the other had a cousin. Election night felt like the freight crossing. You sat with the engine off and listened to the bell.

It went to voters again in 2014 and lost again. By then I'd started to think of a train in Austin like a cold front in August, something everybody talks about with real tenderness and nobody gets to touch.

Then 2020 came, and Project Connect passed, and I felt a feeling I didn't trust. Optimism, I think. I keep it in a drawer now with my pre-2008 property tax statements, as proof that things used to be another way.

The one that finally showed up

The Red Line did open, in 2010, after enough delays that my enthusiasm had fully grown up and moved out. I rode it the first week out of civic duty. The car was clean and cold, it honked like a riverboat, and the only conversation was a guy across the aisle saying "huh" every time it crossed a street, like he was personally amazed it hadn't hit anything.

I loved it, and I'll say so. I loved the hard plastic seats, the swaying, and the strange privilege of watching North Lamar's back side roll past at a speed that felt like progress. You saw backyards. Somebody's trampoline. A guy grilling at ten in the morning on a Tuesday, a man who had clearly worked something out about life that I hadn't.

What I didn't love was the waiting between rides. If you missed one, you had time. Time to read every word on the station sign. Time to learn the name of the grass species growing between the ties. Time to develop opinions about the guy grilling at ten in the morning. I once missed a train by roughly the length of a shoelace and stood there long enough to finish a library book. A short one, but still. Words and everything.

The one with a new name

Which brings me to North Burnet/Uptown.

I want it to open. I want a station up there that works and drops people somewhere useful. But I'd like a moment of silence for the slash in that name, because the slash is where the real estate lives.

"North Burnet" is a road. It has a gas station and a strip center, a dry cleaner, a taqueria, some office parks. It's a name for directions, the kind you give to somebody's mom. "Uptown" is a name for a brochure. Nobody has ever been born in Uptown. Nobody's grandfather had a feed store in Uptown. Uptown is what a leasing office calls a parking garage once it gets a juice bar.

I can picture the meeting, and to be clear, I'm picturing it and not reporting it. Somebody says "North Burnet," and a person in a fleece vest flinches like he's been shown a photo of a vintage Datsun. "What if it's also Uptown?" And so the slash: a little diagonal treaty between the city that exists and the one being marketed to it.

Give it ten years and the slash will be gone. Give it twenty and someone will be nostalgic for "Uptown," calling it the real, gritty, authentic name, back before everything got rebranded as Something District. I'll be ninety, waiting on a platform, still annoyed.

The one I'm waiting on now

By 7:40, the man in the lanyard had worked it out and gone to find a bus, muttering. The grackle stayed. Grackles always stay. They're the only Austin residents who have never once been priced out of anywhere.

I stayed too, a few minutes longer than made sense, because a platform without a train is honest in a way I didn't expect. No arrival board pretending. No announcement saying shortly. Just track, heat, and a promise with a date on it: Thursday for the line, 2027 for the station, and some future year for the bigger system that every map is currently drawing in dotted lines.

Dotted lines. That's the Austin transit tradition, right there. My whole life has been a dotted line between a crossing arm and a ballot box, waiting for somebody to come along with a pen and make it solid.

Four days off is nothing. I've waited on this town's trains through two failed votes, one opening ceremony, a wedding, a divorce, and the full price history of a breakfast taco.

The train is coming back Friday. The grackle and I will believe it when we hear the riverboat horn.