Kyodo via AP Images
A Japanese-style Shinkansen train, seen here, would enable passengers to travel between Dallas and Houston in less than 90 minutes.
Amtrak and Texas Central are exploring a possible partnership to launch a long-anticipated high-speed rail line between Dallas and Houston. That development, if they can pull it off, would not only transform life in one of the fastest-growing states in the country but also demonstrate the viability of stand-alone major city pairs linked by rail or as a segment of a wider national high-speed rail system.
Connecting a metro area of eight million people that includes Dallas, Fort Worth, and Arlington with the Houston metro area of seven million would be a game changer for workers. Prior to the pandemic, Texas Central had its eye on 100,000 super-commuters who travel between the two cities at least once a week—a number that could hold up even in the face of the work-from-home transformation. Despite work-from-home’s entrenchment in Silicon Valley, San Francisco, and New York, key card swipes tell a different story in Texas cities. Houston has long led the country in return-to-office numbers; in June, the city had a 61 percent occupancy rate. Austin is second at nearly 60 percent, and Dallas has a nearly 54 percent rate. (There is also interest in adding a high-speed rail link to Austin.)
“Texas Central is not quite as moribund as we might have expected,” says Allan Rutter, a Texas A&M Transportation Institute senior research scientist. “But frankly, a surface transportation system that connects Dallas to Houston has less to do with central city to central city and more to do with economic region to economic region.”
The relationship is symbiotic. Founded a decade ago to construct and run the line, Texas Central has a state-of-the-art rail project in advanced planning stages that desperately needs momentum and financing. But its financing is aspirational and therefore suspect. The life practically went out of the $30 billion plan after the board of directors and the CEO (who announced his departure on LinkedIn) stepped down last year amid reports that emerged of back property taxes still owed and employees heading for the exits earlier in the pandemic. Now, a potential partnership with Amtrak has brought Texas Central closer to something like stability, even as it cements its new status as a junior partner in the project. That status is a far cry from 2016, when Amtrak sought out the company to partner, but only on ticketing by using Amtrak’s own reservations system.
With Texas Central, Amtrak now sees an opportunity, albeit a challenging one, to bring true high-speed rail to the United States in comparatively short order. With the widespread realization that America’s degrading transportation infrastructure has compromised its economic competitiveness, Amtrak has a healthier profile in the rail sector than it had ten years ago when House Republicans knocked themselves out trying to dismantle it. (It was the ensuing public uproar in the Northeast Corridor from Boston to Washington, where Amtrak is popular and profitable, and in rural communities where its trains are the only public transportation for miles around, that saved it from being hacked up by Congress and sold off to private investors.)
With Texas Central, Amtrak now sees an opportunity, albeit a challenging one, to bring true high-speed rail to the United States in comparatively short order.
Amtrak already has a portfolio of critical priorities: the Gateway Program, which includes a bridge/rail tunnel between New York and New Jersey; the Frederick Douglass Tunnel in Maryland; and restoring Gulf Coast Rail between Mobile, Alabama, and New Orleans.
What’s new is that Amtrak has funding for those projects and others: $66 billion from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act program and discretionary funding, which is a financial entrée that Texas Central likely hungers after. The two rail companies have submitted several grant applications, including one for the Federal-State Partnership for Intercity Passenger Rail program that supports high-speed rail project applications, for study and work for the proposed Dallas-Houston line.
Texas state government has not made any funding commitments and probably won’t, given the venomous opposition of some rural landowners who fear land takings along the planned route, and the hostility of the Republican state government to the state’s Democratic cities. Amtrak has long had eminent domain authority, something that Texas Central only finally gained last year after a Texas Supreme Court decision confirmed that the company could take private land to build the line. “The opposition for property owners is still something that’s a thing and will be if and when Texas Central becomes a lot more active in terms of wanting property,” says Rutter.
If the collaboration succeeds, Amtrak would be better placed to connect with the new private and public systems outside its own network, like California’s high-speed (and slow to get started) rail project or the Orlando-to-Miami high-speed rail line (destined to be the country’s first real high-speed rail route) operated by Brightline, which bills itself as “the only privately owned and operated intercity railroad in the United States,” scheduled to open in mid-September. Amtrak also has high-speed rail hopes for its own regional rail corridors in the Pacific Northwest (a Vancouver, BC-Seattle-Portland line) and in the Southeast (Charlotte-Atlanta-Savannah), as well as upping speeds on the Northeast Corridor route, that are in the early planning stages.
But Texas Central is further along than those projects, having already secured an environmental impact statement and a Federal Railroad Administration ruling that would allow the company to operate Shinkansen, the Japanese high-speed bullet trains, in the U.S., which can hit speeds of 200 miles per hour. The bullet train would knock several hours off the Dallas-Houston commute, reducing it to less than 90 minutes. Today, the 240-mile trip from Dallas to Houston is a grueling four-hour drive.
While the mayors of Dallas and Houston support the project, some state lawmakers frowned on the rail line even when it was touted as a privately funded enterprise. Along with Texas Republicans in Congress, they’re sensitive to the rural property owners’ concerns—not least because rural Texas is the state’s Republican base, while urban Texas is a Democratic stronghold. “A lot of the balancing of interests between urban areas who would be served by the system and the [interests of] rural property owners who would be affected would only come into effect the more Texas Central looks like it’s a going concern—and that’s a question,” says Rutter. It’s still unclear whether Amtrak has all the answers.
