November 20, 2025 - Bloomberg.com, Benton Graham -

The reporter's journey says a lot about the state of passenger rail in many parts of the US, where decades of service cuts have derailed the network’s efficiency — and where efforts to improve speeds are often thwarted by politics. For Graham, there is at least one silver lining: “Taking the train through Texas might not be the fastest…” he writes of his own experience, “but it’s definitely the most social."

Dallas and Houston are 250 miles apart. But if you want to take a train between them, prepare for a 23-hour odyssey that says a lot about where US passenger rail is heading. 

Ethan Oliver is a 22-year old from Pottsboro, a Texas town of fewer than 3,000 near the Oklahoma border. The nearest Amtrak station is a 90-minute drive away, in Dallas. That didn’t stop him and four friends from buying train tickets for a ride to San Antonio aboard the Texas Eagle, one of the state’s three surviving rail routes. He’d only been on a train once before, but it made a big impression, and wanted to show his friends the wonders of intercity passenger rail.

“You look at places like Japan, China, whatever, they have their high-speed rail, and then Europe, it’s all interconnected,” Oliver said. “But like, if you want to do this, it’s a 10-hour trip.”

That’s more than twice the time it would take to drive. But train travel in Texas today is not really about efficiency.

Read more: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-11-20/dallas-to-houston-via-train-is-not-exactly-high-speed-rail

Photo credit: Texas Rail Advocates