“Failed” California, “Self-interested” France: Texas Central Railway gets down and dirty

Amtrak's three-day-per-week Sunset Limited passes a sugar mill in Texas. In the future, the route will offer connections to both the Texas Central Railway (in Houston) and California High-Speed Rail (in Los Angeles). (Photo courtesy of SWRails.com) 

I'd planned to post some April Fools' satire today, perhaps about Duke blaming WMATA-caused electromagnetic interference for its Elite Eight loss to Michigan State at DC's Capitol One Arena.

But while working on a Mobility Lab piece about intercity rail, I came across something equally absurd – but entirely real. Texas Central Partners, the company planning to construct a high-speed rail line linking Dallas and Houston, is to thank.

Private-sector companies like Texas Central have great potential to help improve U.S. intercity rail, as I’ll explore in the upcoming Mobility Lab article. But the company’s March 18 blog post blasting rail systems in France and California demonstrates that Texas Central has a lot to learn if it wants to reach its potential.

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The issue at hand was pretty straightforward. Texas Central plans to use Japanese Shinkansen technology for its trainsets and tracks, a decision that I trust officials made after concluding that particular technology is the best fit for the Dallas-Houston route. Shinkansen trains have certainly done right by Japan, so I’m confident they’ll serve the Lone Star State well too.

But the U.S. subsidiary of SNCF, France’s national rail provider, also had hoped to build a high-speed rail system in Texas. So after Texas Central received a big loan from Japanese entities last year, SNCF publicly questioned several aspects of Texas’s privately-financed project plan.

SNCF America had some legitimately constructive criticism – namely, the proposed Texas Central system would leave much of the state, including major cities such as San Antonio and Austin, without improved rail connections. And given a lack of interoperability with existing conventional lines, Texas Central’s plan offers no feasible way to extend frequent train service to those cities in the near term.

But a more extensive, integrated rail system may require taxpayer funds to construct, something that would be extremely challenging to obtain in a state where Beto O’Rourke couldn’t beat Ted Cruz.

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Texas Central could have responded by framing its market-based approach as a uniquely Texan way to navigate the typical American hurdles and get a big infrastructure project done.

But instead, Texas Central’s blog post began by ripping into not only SNCF, but the entire “European model” for intercity rail service. The post claimed that the TGV and other high-speed systems on the continent are little more than government conspiracies to fleece taxpayers. It also mocked the aging infrastructure-associated challenges European rail systems contend with, without specifying how Texas Central plans to address those same challenges when they arise in the future.

Then, though California wasn’t involved in the debate between Texas Central and SNCF, the company's post attacked that state’s under-construction high-speed rail system. It even embraced the opponent-concocted lie that because Governor Gavin Newsom decided to take a more segmented approach to the project than his predecessors did, the project has failed.

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Texas Central and newly hired Cal Bears basketball coach Mark Fox find themselves in comparable positions. Fox inherited a Cal team that finished dead last in the Pac-12 Conference each of the last two seasons and got blown out by the likes of Yale and Chaminade.

Similarly, though Texas would be the 10^th largest economy in the world if it were its own country, the state currently lacks any intercity passenger rail lines that run more than once per day. The three routes that serve the state – all operated by Amtrak – all ran late more than half the time in Fiscal Year 2018. And there’s no existing direct train service on the Dallas- Houston corridor Texas Central plans to serve.

Just as I hope Fox can lead the Golden Bears back to March Madness, I’m rooting for Texas Central to help fix the state’s inadequate rail system. But the attitude of the company – which has yet to lay an inch of track – is akin to if Fox claimed Cal’s team is superior to those in this year’s Final Four:

• France has nearly 1,700 miles of high-speed rail tracks, and more than 130 million passengers ride TGV trains annually. A 2007 TGV test run on the LGV Est line reached 357 mph, a world record for a wheels-on-rails trainset that still stands today. While Texas landowners desperately try to fight off the threat of a border wall, the TGV system seamlessly extends into several neighboring countries. And I imagine Texans would approve of France’s plans to open up its national rail network to private-sector competition in 2021.
• California’s train system isn’t in the same league as France’s, but the state does boast three intercity rail corridors with frequent service by U.S. standards, along with four long-distance routes. The corridors all rank among the country’s seven most utilized, achieved on-time performances of better than 75 percent in FY 2018, and are complemented by an extensive network of connecting buses. Furthermore, large-scale high-speed rail construction is underway in the state’s Central Valley, and private-sector rail operator Brightline (owned by UK-based Virgin Rail Group) is planning to build a line linking Southern California and Las Vegas.

In its arrogance, Texas Central forgot that if its peers succeed, it benefits. The propagation of high-speed rail across most of the developed world is largely thanks to the success of older services like the Shinkansen and TGV – if those systems didn’t exist, Texas Central likely wouldn’t either. Similarly, once California’s initial operating segment proves itself, other states will beg for similar intercity mobility, giving companies like Texas Central opportunities to expand across the country. 

Also, the Texas and California routes will be part of the same national train system, making their future performance even more mutually dependent. Texas Central has already reached a through-ticketing agreement with Amtrak, which provides one-seat rail service between Los Angeles and both Dallas and Houston. As part of the agreement, Texas Central even plans to shuttle transferring passengers between the two providers’ respective stations.

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Just as with local transit, high speed rail providers in different parts of the world must embrace what works for the regions they serve. This means that trainsets, route alignments, and funding structures will differ from region to region. But as long as the end product moves people safely, reliably, and efficiently, there’s no single right or wrong way to provide rail service.

However, in its response to SNCF, Texas Central sounded more like the Koch-funded Cato Institute (which, unsurprisingly, opposes the Dallas-Houston project) than like a transit provider-to-be.

Since Texas Central is relatively new to the rail business, it should treat this incident as a mistake it can learn from. The company clearly is ambitious, as anyone trying to build a modern intercity rail line in such untested territory must be, and has high hopes for its product.   

Thus, to restore the public’s confidence that it’s serious about getting the project done and mend its relationships with its peer high-speed rail providers, Texas Central’s should delete its March 18 blog post. The company should replace that post with a thoughtful article explaining why its current approach is the best way to navigate Texas’s development patterns, political climate, and culture; deliver top-notch Dallas-Houston train service; and eventually expand to more corridors, both within the state and nationwide.