Will the Houston/Dallas bullet train revolutionize Texas or divide it forever?
Dallas Observer - August 18, 2015

On a hot day in 1991, Nancy Beddingfield stood on her front porch watching a stranger in a suit maneuver his car up the dirt drive of the Busy B Ranch, plumes of red dirt flying up behind him. He parked and strode up the rest of the driveway to her house, built on the edge of her sprawling ranch just outside of Jewett, a small town of about 1,100 residents situated on rolling plains almost exactly midway between Dallas and Houston in Central Texas.


Beddingfield, a petite woman who holds herself so ramrod straight that she seems tall, wasn't going to make it any easier for the man. She greeted him and waited.


“I'd like to buy some land from you,” the stranger said. His company was building a high-speed rail line between Dallas and Houston, he explained, and needed a strip of land through her ranch — the place is so big that almost every proposed infrastructure project must pass through it — and was prepared to offer a fair price for it.


Read more: http://www.houstonpress.com/news/on-the-line-will-the-houston-dallas-bullet-train-revolutionize-texas-or-divide-it-forever-7679365