September 1, 2024 - TRA Newswire -
Despite some naysayers saying that the high-speed rail project between Dallas and Houston is DOA and others trying their best to kill it, there is still slow but steady movement on this critical infrastructure project that would connect the two mega-cities in about 90 minutes.
In August the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) granted $63.9 million for Amtrak to continue planning and advancing the project that Texas Central Railway brought close to the construction stage. An initial federal grant of $500,000 started the clock in December 2023 for the Corridor Identification Program, which the FRA sees as important for building passenger rail corridors in high-traffic regions like Dallas-Houston.
In a conversation with Texas Rail Advocates President Peter LeCody, Amtrak Senior Vice-President for High Speed Rail Andy Byford said "the main headline is that, under Amtrak’s leadership, we have progressed the project to the third (and final) step of the FRA Corridor Identification Program. This will enable us to further progress preliminary engineering, design and environmental work."
Byford, who is a rail and transit expert in his field and has brought other major projects to completion, indicated that "a lot remains to be done so it’s by no means a done deal, but I’m pleased with the progress we’ve made."
There is still a lot of behind the scenes work going on with Texas Central and some of the original investors and players are still active while Amtrak works toward bringing the project forward.
You may recall that while the pandemic stopped work on the bullet train project for nearly two years, Texas Central continued to be hammered by a handful of rural lawmakers and some landowners that dragged them repeatedly through courts on land rights, driving up costs. The Texas Supreme Court, in 2022, finally recognized that the company had eminent domain authority to acquire strips of land needed to build the rail line, but the initial funding for the project was used up and the railroad's board and CEO stepped down. 40% of the land needed for the high-speed rail line had already been acquired. Amtrak, already intertwined with a through-ticketing agreement with Texas Central, stepped up to help shepherd the project further down the track.
A hit piece in the Daily Caller calls the project 'Insolvent and Foolish' and quotes some of the usual suspects that think the funding for high-speed rail should go to other projects. John Sitilides, a federal affairs advisor speaking for a Texas anti-rail group called Reroute the Route, said the $64 million advanced in August should have gone to build or repair schools or hire hundreds of border agents. “The federal budget deficit approaches $2 trillion, our national debt exceeds $35 trillion, and the White House is wasting scarce federal taxpayer dollars on this controversial, failing, insolvent and foolish $40 billion Amtrak pork project."
Never for a loss of words against high-speed rail in Texas, Congressman Jake Ellzey was quoted in the one-sided story as saying “$64M of taxpayer money should not be wasted on a High-Speed Rail project that not only has a negative impact on rural Texas but on all of the United States. in the time of a global food shortage we cannot allow our farmland to be destroyed and taxpayer dollars squandered for an unsustainable and unnecessary project like this, according to Ellzey."
Countering that assertion, in 2017, the proposed bullet train between Dallas and Houston was among a litany of transportation projects considered priorities by then President Donald Trump’s transition team. In a conversation with Elon Musk several weeks ago on social platform X, Trump reiterated that "they go unbelievably fast, unbelievably comfortable with no problems, and we don't have anything like that in this country. Not even close. And it doesn't make sense that we don't, doesn't make sense."
The project still maintains strong support from the business communities in North Texas and the Greater Houston region.
Photo credit: Texas Central file
