Texas’ high-speed rail project gets federal approval, but will it really be built?
A proposed high-speed rail line from Dallas to Houston has received federal approval to begin construction, but more legal challenges may remain.
The Federal Railroad Administration on Monday issued a record of decision, as well as a rule of particular applicability — documents that complete the six-year-old environmental review process and provide safety standards for construction to proceed.
Company officials said Monday they had received word of the decisions, although the documents had not yet been published in the federal register.
The proposed rail line would be built on above-ground tracks used exclusively by the bullet trains. Supporters pledge that passengers would be able to travel from downtown Dallas to Houston in about 90 minutes, with one stop in the Brazos Valley near College Station.
The cost of a ticket would be competitive with air fares between Texas’ two largest cities.
“This is the moment we have been working towards,” Carlos Aguilar, chief executive officer of Texas Central Railroad, said in a press release. Texas Central Railroad is the brand name of the company building the project.
Aguilar said the federal decisions represent “years of work by countless individuals, affirming a very thorough and careful federal regulatory process that will make the Texas Central Railroad the first high-speed rail system to be implemented in the United States.”
The federal documents provide a regulatory framework for governing signal and train set control, track, rolling stock, operating rules and practices, system qualifications and maintenance, company officials said.
Texas Central Railroad proposes to build a system with the same technology used on Japan’s Tokaido Shinkansen high-speed rail system.
In May, a federal appeals court issued a ruling that Texas Central could be considered a railroad under Texas law, providing the company with essential powers to buy — or possibly condemn — private land to build its tracks.
Construction on the project, which is expected to take six years, could begin as soon as next year, Aguilar said in an interview. Aguilar also said the estimated cost of the project was roughly $20 billion, and Texas Central had received letters of interest from prospective investors amounting to roughly half that amount.
Company officials say they already have control of more than 600 parcels of land needed for the project. They also say the rail line will create more than 17,000 direct jobs, and 20,000 supply chain jobs.
But groups opposed to the high-speed rail line have pledged to continue their fight.
Officials at one such group, Texans Against High-Speed Rail, said the federal government’s decisions are not the “green light” to begin construction that Texas Central says they are.
“Texas Central will likely trumpet this decision as major progress for its project, but they are simply arranging deckchairs on the Titanic,” Kyle Workman, Texans Against HSR president, wrote on the organization’s Facebook page.
“Texans and federal taxpayers need to know this Record of Decision doesn’t change the fact that Texas Central has put up Texas land as collateral to the Japanese government when the project fails, while at the same time asking for billions in federal dollars to prop up its so-called ‘private project’ that is already failing in its ‘conceptual design’ stage,” Workman wrote.
Workman’s organization also has alleged that Texas Central has deeded property from Texas landowners to the Japanese government, through an offshore entity set up in the Cayman Islands.
Some of Texas Central’s partners in the project include:
▪ Webuild — Italian industrial group Salini Impregilo and Lane Construction Corp. formed this entity to supply the civil infrastructure work for the project.
▪ Bechtel — A Virginia-based rail program manager.
▪ Central Japan Railway — Will provide the technology used in the Central Japan Railway.
▪ Renfe — A Spanish firm that will operate the system.
▪ Team Shinkansen United — Provides high-speed rail technology on Tokaido Shinkansen. The firm includes Hitachi, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Toshiba, NEC, and JRC.
▪ Kiewit — Nebraska-based firm will provide train operations along with Mass Electric Construction Co. based in Massachusetts.
▪ Matthews Southwest, a Texas real estate developer, and Suffolk Construction of Massachusetts will develop and build train stations.
This story was originally published September 21, 2020 at 12:50 PM.
