Where Train Dreams Meet Reality in Texas [View all]

Where Train Dreams Meet Reality in Texas
Dallas and Houston are 250 miles apart. But if you want to take a train between them, prepare for a 23-hour odyssey that says a lot about where US passenger rail is heading.

By Benton Graham
November 20, 2025 at 9:00 AM EST


(Bloomberg CityLab) Ethan Oliver is a 22-year old from Pottsboro, a Texas town of fewer than 3,000 near the Oklahoma border. The nearest Amtrak station is a 90-minute drive away, in Dallas. That didn’t stop him and four friends from buying train tickets for a ride to San Antonio aboard the Texas Eagle, one of the state’s three surviving rail routes. He’d only been on a train once before, but it made a big impression, and wanted to show his friends the wonders of intercity passenger rail.

“You look at places like Japan, China, whatever, they have their high-speed rail, and then Europe, it’s all interconnected,” Oliver said. “But like, if you want to do this, it’s a 10-hour trip.”

That’s more than twice the time it would take to drive. But train travel in Texas today is not really about efficiency.

....(snip)....

I recently found myself sharing an Amtrak Superliner coach with Oliver and his friends because I came across a stat that says a lot about the state of passenger rail in many parts of the US: By train, it would take you 23 hours to get from Dallas to Houston, even though these two major cities are separated by less than 250 miles and were first connected by rail in 1872.

You’d spend 10 hours on the Texas Eagle from Dallas to San Antonio, do an eight-hour overnight layover in San Antonio, then take the Sunset Limited from San Antonio for the last five-hour leg to Houston. The zig-zagging route means that a determined bicyclist could beat the diesel locomotives by an hour and a half, according to Google Maps. ...................(more)

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-11-20/dallas-to-houston-via-train-is-not-exactly-high-speed-rail?srnd=phx-citylab