Mystery Train: The Texas High-Speed Rail That Wasn't

The entire Corridor project, as currently planned, will cost over $184 billion to construct over the next 50 years. It will allow the state to usurp nearly 9,000 square miles of mostly privately-owned rural farmland. It will also be over 4,000 miles long and be up to 1,200 feet wide, with extra miles of land in each direction from the superhighway being retained by the state to lease to whomever it pleases. First and foremost, this is a plan to create a huge transportation cable stretching from Laredo to Oklahoma, allowing for the quicker & cheaper flow of goods to and from Mexico under the NAFTA system. As mentioned, the Corridor won’t even connect with a single major metropolitan area; instead, it will go around them to reduce urban traffic. Individual passenger needs appear to be secondary.

In the coming decades, the population of Texas is predicted to increase exponentially. With all those people, Texas highways in their current capacity will be rendered obsolete. The Texas Department of Transportation (TXDOT) and Gov. Rick Perry, acting together in support of this plan, have both repeatedly claimed that the Corridor plan is the best way to prepare for this imminent transportation crisis.

That contention is under hot debate presently. It goes without saying that there are a good many people – mostly rural Texans, but city-folks as well – who are pretty upset about this Corridor plan. After all, it’s their land that the state government would be taking, in extreme cases uprooting farming families who have occupied their land for hundreds of years. Complaints about the Trans-Texas Corridor typically deal with private property rights & eminent domain, shady dealings between Gov. Perry and private business interests who want a piece of the construction action, expensive tolls for roads they’re already taxed on, and the generally poor level of planning & thought that they believe has gone into this costly endeavor. For those acting in support of the Corridor – mostly businesses – it’s obviously a boon. For those who are against it, it’s understood that their vote in this November’s gubernatorial election is the only weapon left to ward off this juggernaut. Carole Keeton Strayhorn, one of Gov. Perry’s opponents this fall, has publicly condemned the Corridor plan on several occasions. Of course, it didn’t help quell the outrage of angry rural landowners when, last year, the construction contract for the Trans-Texas Corridor went to Cintra Zachry, a Spanish company, which would finance and build the project, as well as collect tolls on it. Soon afterward, Attorney General Greg Abbott ordered Perry to disclose the details of this contract to the general public. To date, the Governor still refuses to release the specifics of this deal – a subject of ongoing litigation at present.

However, way back in the early 1990s, there was once a dream of efficient, intrastate passenger travel in Texas, a dream of de-clogging Texas highways and traveling across this huge state in a quick, relatively cheap and easy fashion. That dream came very close to becoming a reality, and it was known as Texas High-Speed Rail. This was a very different project than the Trans-Texas Corridor.

In 1989, the 71st Texas Legislature decided to create the Texas High-Speed Rail Authority (THSRA) to come up with a plan addressing the need for more efficient public transportation between the major urban areas throughout the state. It had a board of 11 members, and it was charged with determining whether high-speed rail was in the public interest, and if so, awarding a contract to construct/operate a high-speed rail service to the most qualified applicant. Within a relatively short period of time, THSRA had both determined that Texas needed such a transportation system and initiated proceedings for choosing the company to build and operate it.

In 1991, the job went to the Texas TGV Consortium, a conglomerate of American and French-Canadian financial and construction companies. Their plan was to unite Dallas, Houston, Austin and San Antonio in a seamless network of high-speed trains. These trains would travel as fast as 200 miles per hour, serve meals and drinks on board and charge relatively low ticket fares. However it would cost $5.6 billion to construct. As part of its contract, TGV was told that it must raise all the money for the project from private donors, and that no Texas public money would be used. This proved to be the challenge that would ultimately cripple the project.

At the same time, Dallas-based airline company Southwest Airlines launched a sweeping, aggressive public relations campaign throughout the state in order to discredit TGV and prevent the company from meeting its fundraising deadlines. Why? Because they dominated (and still dominate) the friendly skies between Dallas, Houston and San Antonio with a business plan identical to the one proposed by TGV. It was their monopolized turf. In a huge state with no other high-speed transportation options available, Southwest Airlines has always been the intra-Texas transport of choice for many people going from city to city who don’t want to make the long drives.

As you can guess, Southwest Airlines succeeded in preserving its dominance. By 1994, TGV was unable to meet its fundraising deadlines (it was only able to gather less than half of what its contract required, and several dedicated investors backed out at the last minute), and so the state of Texas, under then-Governor Ann Richards, dropped the axe on TGV’s contract. Thanks to successful lobbying by Southwest Airlines, no one else was chosen to complete the job, and the THSRA was officially shut down in 1994, successfully discrediting the concept of efficient high-speed passenger rail among Texans and setting progress back on updating statewide transportation by decades in one swift blow.

To be sure, the Trans-Texas Corridor plan includes a high-speed rail system. Yet the difference between this system and the one rubbed out by Southwest Airlines a decade ago is obvious: The planned Corridor loops around every metropolitan area; it doesn’t touch any major cities. High-speed rail customers will be forced to rent cars from their final destinations to reach these metropolitan areas. With the old TGV proposal, the train tracks were actually connected straight into the airports at Dallas and Houston, making it more similar to the world-renowned high-speed rail systems throughout Europe and Japan, which typically provide for a smooth connection between train and plane for its passengers.

Care to weigh in, fellow Austinites? What do you think about the current Trans-Texas Corridor plan? Would the original high-speed rail idea have been better? Have any better ideas?

Further reading for all you train enthusiasts:
Trans-Texas Corridor homepage
CorridorWatch.Org
TexasTollParty.com
Article from “Railway Age” (July 7, 1991)
Brief history of Texas TGV
Map of scrapped Texas TGV plan
Analysis of high-speed rail for Texas (September 2004)

*Images courtesy of Wikipedia, TEXDOT and Trainweb.org.