IronTiger

I know one famously defunct 290 car dealership was Lawrence Marshall Hempstead...the road to Houston just never was the same again... There was also Knapp Chevrolet near the Holiday Inn on Interstate 10, that went away during widening.

The Monument Inn was also good, but I had a cold at the time and couldn't fully appreciate it. (and that's nostalgia for me... ) Looks like the actual building was razed between 2004 and 2005.

Yeah, I agree. It looks basically looks like a transit center with some modern stylings (can METRO afford such things? No, not really). Remember that Cypress has basically something similar (dense luxury apartments playing up the "urban" angle, ground level retail, etc.). Either way, it does look plausible and not some fever dream after a few hits of alcohol and PCP.

Where was the San Jacinto Inn? Did it have rooms at all?

I like the sound of this. Bus connection between NW Transit Center and Uptown isn't a bad idea, it would eliminate transfers. Out of curiosity, is a dual light rail/BRT track feasible/possible?

They show a road on the old railroad ROW, I hope that ends up becoming a light rail like it's supposed to be. Otherwise, it does look pretty cool. Other than cool but impractical-looking elevated bus loop, it looks like just a big mixed-use development that has apartments, some retail, and other stuff. EDIT: Woo-hoo! Got to "High Rise", leaving the old Days Inn "Hotel" behind. Reminds me of SimTower.

How soon? As mentioned earlier, some of these "stubs" have lasted for decades, with some yet to go to full potential. I do see that the ROW is cleared, that's good, now just to cross the light rail track* and the main railroad track. * Yes really. Go to Google Maps, you'll see the north track doesn't connect at all to the main line and instead goes up to the light rail system.

Third update created. Now that it's done, I'm going to try to cycle with other projects I've been meaning to do...

I think that was before the McDonald's packed up and demolished the old Magnolia Bar & Grill, so that's another vacancy. And frankly, if the sexually oriented businesses (strip clubs, novelty stores etc.) to fast food is almost one to one, you've got a HUGE problem! Maybe it was another part of Richmond, but I seem to remember the road in this general vicinity tending to be a disaster area (tons of potholes!)

The Shell at Jones and 290 seems to be one of the "hexagonal" Shell stations that I could find two or three others of (at least) elsewhere in town. So were the "unmanned" stations just pay at the pump with no convenience store? How did they make any money?

They have aerial photographs of the area (and possibly have even crisper ones than what Google Earth can provide). That way, they could tear it up, repair the utilities and place them exactly in the way they were placed (to a certain degree)

It's a HSR, not METRO (or even TxDOT). I'm not saying that we should build it now before roads become catastrophic, or build it in hopes that high density will sprout like mushrooms after a good rain, it's looking toward the future.

No, it's really not. Sure, College Station has gotten a reputation for "small, unimpressive college town" and it's certainly not as big as Houston or Dallas, where every local victory seems like a toddler learning to tie his shoes ("Hey, we're getting a Saltgrass Steakhouse!" "") but it is going somewhere and will be an important link in the future (after all, take a look at any given Houston suburb in the last 10 years, they're all different). It's also very difficult to judge a city if you've only been to it 10-15 years ago (if ever), so that's understandable, AND if you yourself live in one of the largest cities in the nation.

Austin IS dozens of miles out of the way, College Station isn't. So I made a few paths in Google Earth: a Houston-CS-Dallas running largely over existing rail corridors is 258 miles. If you go north toward The Woodlands, you can't do that with existing rail corridors because you'll end up Palestine, 146 miles out and way off from the freeway. If you took the railroad that goes northwest roughly along the 249/Tomball area to Dallas, that's 226 miles...assuming no city bypasses. And since that rail runs so close to the B-CS area anyway (closer than I-45) I can add just less than 25 miles to that to make a full three-stop train. Now, I suppose a spur could go west toward Austin and College Station, but at the mere distances we're talking about (maybe 20-30, not 50-100), the same people who complain about College Station being a stop on a Houston-Dallas route would be complaining about it on an Austin-College Station route. And Interstate 45 will always be there. EDIT: Even if you draw a line on the map with your finger from Houston to Dallas, that is no way a straight line even close to reality. A true "triangle" would put Interstate 45 closer to 249 (near Beltway 8) and blast straight through the western part of The Woodlands.

Here's the thing: if it connects to CS, it doesn't actually have to stop there. They don't even have to build a station immediately, but it would save a lot of money and time if they wanted to do it down the road. The thing about trains is that they have different times--trains may stop at CS, express routes would bypass it.

I was playing around with a measurement tool between Dallas and Houston and found that College Station's stop (not Waco) wouldn't actually add a lot of mileage (10-20 miles). I think an HSR should have at least 3 stops...and CS is better than Huntsville. Of course Dallas and Houston are bigger cities with more people and more people coming, but I think that's a poor excuse to keep HSR out.

Well, which part? There's the Inner Loop part with Afton Oaks, Culberson, and whole METRO fiasco, but Richmond goes farther west than that. Never mind, it is outer loop. I...don't know.

One of the things I've read about Houston is historically converting old houses to non-residential uses like businesses (with signage, no residential use). Are there any examples where the reverse has happened, where a converted house was renovated/restored back into residential without destroying any features of the house that the business didn't? If so, are there any good specific examples?

When Amtrak did operate locally, they did use single track corridors for going to CS. I noticed in Hempstead there's an abandoned siding (formerly a line that went to Elgin) that appears to have no "real" purpose. I also think I remember reading that Amtrak would sometimes sit on a siding to give right of way to a freight train.

I wanna see this German exterior high school.

Am I the only one disappointed that 24 stories seems a bit small?

Yes, I know why there's no slow spots, that's the reason why Amtrak failed but HSR won't. Frankly, I can't imagine that you would consider Dallas-Houston a "priority" while considering no other stops. Secondly, "some middle of nowhere of college town" clearly shows that you have no idea of the major changes afoot (or even been there in the last five-ten years, if ever). But that's okay, I know you didn't mean it to be rude. It's definitely growing and in many ways under-served. Interstate 45 bypassed B-CS years ago. We now have an opportunity to do something different.

How is fighting against townhomes a "bad" thing?

Amtrak failed the Dallas-Corsicana-College Station-Houston route because a few factors that aren't accounted for: - There were slow spots, including a sharp curve at Hempstead and some extremely slow going in Dallas for reasons not entirely clear - College Station wasn't nearly the force it is now back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. - Corsicana definitely isn't a commuter stop for Dallas, despite some pretty good industrial base for a town that size (Kohl's and Home Depot distrib. centers, for starters) - Waco's growth has been deliberately stymied for decades. College Station, Houston, Dallas...they have futures. Waco's not exactly a growth market, and if Waco was a stock, you'd never want to buy it if you wanted to cash out later. College Station and Houston are things you want to invest in. - Amtrak never stopped in Waco because that's not how the rails ran, not because of any decisions. Amtrak does stop in McGregor, which is west of Waco. Even that isn't too far away, as Waco's city limits directly touch McGregor's airport.

I have no idea how many merchants were in the Shamrock at any given time. The same article mentions a jeweler that stayed from 1949 to 1985 (the entire span of the hotel save for the months leading up to closure in 1986) and the "Irish Shop" which stayed very briefly (late 1985). It's a bit of a bummer since the location was always never great but McCarthy moved forward anyway, leading to a state where only about half of the hotel rooms would be filled even by the early 1960s.