Back to the TRE route.
Is anything about allowing any future Amtrak trains tucked into a subsection of a sub-paragraph in the Agreement?
The project I keep watching in Texas is Lone Star Rail, which has been slow-walking for a long time now. If this commuter line were ever built, it could get the Texas Eagle away from freight all the way from San Antonio to Taylor.
The HSR has significant opposition in the legislature from rural representatives. ...
Lone Star Rail is not HSR. It's the proposal for a commuter/intra-metro corridor service from
San Antonio at the southern end, thru Schertz-New Braunfels-San Marcos-
Austin-Georgetown to Taylor at the northern end. This freight corridor is extremely busy -- Mexico to the Midwest --and in the old-fashioned way, the tracks run thru the downtowns. That would make good places for stations serving passengers, but it's terrible for drivers when mile-long freights lumber thru at 15 mph. Building new tracks for the freights to by-pass all or part of the San Antonio and Austin metro areas would make sense. Then using the existing tracks for passenger rail makes good sense, too.
The
Eagle would greatly benefit from upgrades to the passenger tracks and no more congestion from freights. The current schedule takes 4 hrs ~20 min from exurban Taylor to center city San Antonio southbound (27 mph), and 3 hrs ~20 minutes northbound (35 mph), to cover 117 miles. So we have a LD train between Austin and San Antonio, with over a million population each, their downtown stations a mere 82 miles apart, but it takes about 3 hours to make the run. Don't expect heavy ridership on that segment or the overlapping Dallas-Ft Worth-Austin-San Antonio section either. But it could be lucrative for the
Eagle to be part of a
Lone Star corridor service, with enuff capital investments for upgrades and a run time of 1 hr 20 min (60 mph) or
less.
Now if only Central Texas can get the kind of federal funding that Ft Worth CongressCritters secured for a commuter rail line in that area.
