Trinity Mills Station

In the heart of Carrollton, Texas, adjacent to the Trinity Mills train station, sits a 25-acre urban transit-oriented development featuring office buildings, luxury apartment homes, entertainment, retail, and a hotel within public plazas and promenades. Trinity Mills Station also offers roughly seven miles of paved trails, along with vibrant streetscapes, upscale restaurants, a burgeoning art scene, and numerous other appealing components.

Stakeholders in the development including the City of Carrollton were seeking a crown jewel feature that would pay homage to Carrollton’s history as the intersection of three major railroads while serving as a unique entertainment attraction and “Instagrammable” setting for the development’s tenants and residents, as well as locals and visitors from near and far.

Idea

Our team joined general contractor Joeris General Contractors and the project’s landscape architect Kimley-Horn in creating a one-of-a-kind show fountain that would distinguish Trinity Mills Station from other developments in the area.

The project, which OTL designed and constructed, was inspired by the City of Carrollton’s railroad system. It comprises a pool of water lined on one side with a dozen 20-foot-tall poles that support custom fabricated semaphores—similar to those still used to define stop/go signals on railroads across the country—shooting streams of water that dance up and down in a wave-like motion.

Dazzling lighting effects are achieved through light fixtures and customized dichroic glass that makes up the fountain’s “blades,” and artificial fog installed atop the poles. These elements produce an effect that harkens back to the days when locomotives and freight trains used steam engines, the lighted fog evoking images of steam from a 19th-Century engine illuminated by the surrounding lights. As the angle of the glass shifts relative to the sunlight, a spectrum of color is emitted, combining with the LED light fixtures and fog effect to produce awe-inspiring shows sure to engage audiences of all ages. The glass blades will also function as a clock for this visually stunning project, with each pole representing a different hour of the day.

Our team’s greatest challenge was presenting the idea for this never-before-seen project—one that was unique even to us. To prove our concept, we developed custom drawings and created a working prototype to ensure our design was valid. Using new components and equipment for the first time ever, we built and operated a semaphore at our test facility in Anaheim, ensuring that the cyclical operation anticipated in the field would be successfully replicated in the testing process. Another challenge was incorporating cast stainless steel as part of the structure, requiring us to become quickly accustomed to the intricacies of working with this material. Custom dichroic tempered glass is extremely delicate and necessitated the utmost deftness from our artisans and builders as they fastened the water nozzles to the glass, so as not to damage it.

Other creative solutions we applied in constructing the fountain included repurposing utility poles to support all mechanical, electrical and hydraulic gear, and utilizing compact servo motors to drive the semaphores up and down based on DMX data from our choreographed show sequence. The RGB lighting (also DMX controlled) shines through three separate openings in each of the 24 semaphores to produce breathtaking displays.

Impact

At Trinity Mills Station, OTL delivered a highly detailed show fountain that is both elegant and amazing. The historical significance of this water feature, with its nod to train stations of old and Carrollton’s own rich past, is apparent to all who experience it. The fountain’s rainbow of colors, mood-creating fog and oscillating waves will attract and enchant visitors to this development for decades to come.