NASA My Amtrak?

Perhaps There's A Better Way to Run a Railroad

About fifteen minutes outside Lyon, France, just after crossing the Rhône, the TGV—Train à Grande Vitesse, literally “High Speed Train”—began to pick up speed. Soon, the suburbs gave way to fields of freshly turned earth and fog-shrouded vineyards, which whooshed by as the train accelerated up to 320 kilometers per hour (199 mph). It was almost too quick. The power-recliner seats were a comfortable berth in which to doze, and I spent half the ride pleasantly napping rather than enjoying the scenery. In less than two hours, the train glided into Paris’s Gare de Lyon, a nearly 450-kilometer (280-mile) journey that would have taken almost five hours by car. 

A trip on Amtrak’s Texas Eagle between San Antonio and Dallas, traveling a comparable distance of 273 miles, takes 8.5 hours—an average speed of 32 miles an hour. Plenty of time to take in the scenery, at least.

Texas high-speed rail (HSR) is something of a holy grail among urbanists and transit enthusiasts. Various plans have been floated over the years to no avail, although the prospects for the latest stalled concept, a private initiative that would link Houston and Dallas called Texas Central Railway, were recently resurrected by the Biden Administration and Amtrak. Of course, transit folks are worried about what the re-election of Donald Trump means for that and other HSR plans. As

Benjamin Schneider

asks, will Trump derail everything?

The Texas Triangle, the region bounded by Houston, San Antonio, Dallas-Fort Worth, and Austin, where 70% of the state lives, is fertile ground for high speed rail. The terrain is mostly flat, and the four cities are in the sweet spot for HSR: far enough from each other to make for an unpleasant journey on some of America’s most congested and deadly highways, but close enough to be competitive with short-haul airlines.

Jeff Fong

writes:

High-speed rail is the right technology for binding the state’s most productive urban centers into a single mega region and setting the stage for generations of future prosperity.

As he says, it’s “something that should exist.” Yet in Texas and most of the country, it doesn’t. Why not? 

Consider California. The California High-Speed Rail (CAHSR) project, intended to connect Los Angeles and San Francisco, has become the kind of boondoggle that conservatives love to point to as evidence of liberal malfeasance. Fifteen years and billions of taxpayer dollars later, the CAHSR Authority now promises to deliver a single 170-mile segment between Merced and Bakersfield—by 2030, if it can close its funding gap. This segment alone is expected to cost as much as the entire project was originally estimated to cost in 2008, and—guess what and by the way—the CEO says another $100 billion will be needed to finish the job.

The project has struggled with engineering challenges, meeting environmental requirements, and bureaucratic incompetence. This slow-motion train wreck was beholden to and doomed by political whims from the start. SNCF, which runs France’s TGV, backed out of the project in 2011 and went on to build HSR in “less politically dysfunctional” Morocco, where the Al Boraq high-speed train opened in 2018.

Notably, both the TGV and Al Boraq are run by state-owned railways. The difference is that France (and Morocco) sees high-speed rail as a means of providing transportation and has built up tremendous capacity by doing so for more than forty years. In America, conversely, public rail is seen first as a means of providing jobs and rewarding political cronies. The rail is an afterthought.

Meanwhile, a different story is playing out in Southern California, where a private company is building Brightline West, a new HSR line from eastern Los Angeles County to Las Vegas. Following its success in Florida, where it runs America’s second-busiest passenger rail line after Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor, Brightline’s 200-mph trains will halve the typical travel time between Las Vegas and LA, giving gamblers better odds of getting to Sin City quickly than a congested drive across the Mojave Desert. Financed by a mixture of private and public sources, construction began in April on this 218-mile, $12-billion project and is expected to take four years, with operations beginning in 2028. If delivered on budget, Brightline West would cost about $55 million per mile, about four times less than CAHSR so far.

Which brings us back to Texas Central. 

Though the terrain is flat, getting HSR built in Texas was always going to be an uphill battle. Nevertheless, as Schneider describes, Texas Central secured hundreds of millions in financing, the requisite regulatory approvals, and about 30% of the right-of-way needed to build the line. It has received tepid support from US Senators Ted Cruz and John Cornyn, but the project is unpopular with the ranchers whose lands the line would pass through. Indeed, as early as 2015, a group calling itself Texans Against High-Speed Rail emerged to, as their website states:

protect property, property rights and values, and our way of life from the negative impacts of high-speed rail, as well as prevent the wasteful use of taxpayer dollars or public subsidies for high-speed rail transportation.

No doubt much of this is a response to California’s high-speed fail, but some of it reflects the strong anti-transit bias in Texas culture. The state legislature is likely to forbid any use of public funds for private rail, and while Texas Central was granted eminent domain power in 2022, it hasn’t yet exercised it (and it shouldn’t). This and the example of Brightline West should give critics some assurance that a better path is possible in Texas.

So if it can overcome the opposition, Texas Central will have to get creative in financing and obtaining rights-of-way. And perhaps this is where Amtrak can be the most helpful. As Schneider reports, Andy Byford, Amtrak’s Senior Vice President for High-Speed Rail Development Programs (“Train Daddy” to his stans), “has previously said [Texas Central] will have a financing package ‘the likes of which has not been seen before.’” Byford cites a mix of private and federal funding sources that Texas Central could draw on.

But Byford’s ambitions for the project go beyond financing support. He says, “My working assumption and my professional preference would be that this would be an Amtrak-run service.”

Perhaps it should not. 

Amtrak runs the Acela, America’s only true high-speed train—which reaches its top speed on only 10% of the Northeast Corridor, averaging 70 mph over the entire route. Though that route is immensely popular, Amtrak struggles with chronic funding shortages, inefficiencies, and aging infrastructure. The fact that it runs the once-per-day, 32-mph Texas Eagle when the privately-owned FlixBus offers around 20 rides per day for roughly the same price and in less time is evidence that Amtrak is beholden to the same political, non-economic whims that have beleaguered California’s HSR. Amtrak’s operating record and political nature do not inspire confidence about its prospects in Texas.

Rather than running the train, Amtrak could perhaps be a facilitator of private high-speed rail in Texas and other regions where it makes sense. Aside from its financing support, Amtrak has a national reach, experience managing a complex network of rights-of-way, and regulatory expertise, all of which could be put to use in America’s fledgling private passenger rail industry.

That’s of course if the new administration will allow it. 

Incidentally, there’s reason to think the president-elect just might. In a conversation with Elon Musk last August, Trump “lamented” the lack of high-speed bullet trains in America. Speaking of Japan’s Shinkansen, he said:

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. (HT:

Andy Boenau

)

Critics pointed out that when he was last president, in 2019, Trump canceled a nearly billion-dollar federal grant to CAHSR. Given that that project is actively and expensively failing to deliver, this does not evince disdain for high-speed rail as much as it does for throwing taxpayer dollars into the blackhole of California public works. But while Trump’s praise for Japan’s bullet trains is interesting (and welcome), his choice of venue—a conversation with Elon Musk—intrigues me more. 

Musk’s SpaceX and its competitors have flourished since NASA decided to facilitate the development of a private space industry via, for instance, the Commercial Resupply Services and Commercial Crew Programs. Rather than using expensive NASA-built spacecraft, private companies now ferry cargo and astronauts to the International Space Station, which has dramatically lowered costs.

Former NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver, one of the administrators who led the change (with President Obama’s blessing), found that NASA “stumbled with cost overruns and delays rooted in the muck of bureaucracy, political self-interests, legacy contracts and a dated way of doing business.” The agency, which in a different era pioneered modern manned space flight, had become mired in bureaucratic inefficiency, perpetuating a cycle that hindered innovation. According to Garver, “the process and bureaucracy, and the system with Congress gets really cumbersome and keeps you from making progress.”

Sound familiar?

We are in an interesting moment where, when it comes to high-speed rail, we have several circumstances we haven’t simultaneously had before: 1) a private company that has proven it can build and run a railroad; 2) a growing recognition on the left that bureaucratic proceduralism and “Everything Bagel Liberalism” are anathema to progress; and 3) an incoming administration that is promising regulatory reform, predisposed toward private enterprise, and interested in America’s capacity to build hardware.

Call me optimistic, but we might actually be able to make some progress here.

If Amtrak takes a page from NASA, it could work with Texas Central and other regional HSR companies to foster a new private passenger railroad industry that can actually deliver high-speed rail—and trains—on time. Amtrak alone doesn’t have the escape velocity to overcome its own bureaucratic and political handicaps, but perhaps it could leverage its institutional know-how to usher in a new golden era of private American rail. That’s if its administrators can think, like those at NASA, of the bigger picture and long-term prosperity of our country, rather than of shortsighted political agendas and their own egos. 

I dream of the day when I can ride a TGV-style train across the Texas plains to the center cities of our Lone Star metropolises. But if Amtrak insists on putting its name on the side of the railcar, I fear the dream may remain just that.

Perhaps it’s time to NASA my Amtrak.