TX: Is rail dream real? Local leaders revive talk of S.A.-to-Austin train service.

Before sunrise on a Monday in September, Bexar County Judge Peter Sakai and San Antonio City Councilwoman Melissa Cabello Havrda gathered with other South Texas leaders at the local Amtrak station, near the Alamodome, to board the once-daily train to Austin.

They weren't taking the train, known as the Texas Eagle, to make appointments up north — with frequent delays on the route, hardly anyone does. The purpose of their 2.5-hour ride was to raise awareness for their campaign to develop reliable passenger rail service between San Antonio and Austin — the kind that people might actually use to get to work or to a business meeting, or for a day trip to watch the Spurs play or catch a show at Austin City Limits.

Upon reaching Austin, they laid out their case for rail in a news conference led by Travis County Judge Andy Brown, who helped launch the campaign last year: Austin and San Antonio are growing into a "booming super-region," Brown said, and commuters need an alternative to the dangerous and congested Interstate 35. Better rail service could spur economic growth and help the environment.

With the federal government making $66 billion available for rail projects under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the local region has a "once-in-a-generation opportunity," he said, calling upon state legislators to provide the required matching funds.

Despite the enthusiasm on display that day, area officials and transportation experts acknowledge the campaign faces long odds. As of now, advocates can offer few specifics as to what the rail service might look like — or how it might be achieved. No budget has been proposed, and it's not clear if needed funding could be obtained.

It's also not the first attempt to make a San Antonio to Austin commuter rail a reality.

A similar push failed less than a decade ago, though it was well-funded and overseen by a team of rail professionals. Known as the Lone Star Rail District, it attracted broad support among municipalities along I-35, but in the end it floundered because it couldn't win over the most crucial stakeholder of all: the rail company Union Pacific.

If more passenger trains are to be run between San Antonio and Austin, it will almost certainly need to be with some level of cooperation from Union Pacific, the freight giant that owns the only route linking the cities — a route that functions as a crucial link in the U.S. supply chain, carrying manufactured goods and produce from Mexico to consumers across the nation.

And Union Pacific has made it quite clear, in a letter to Brown about two weeks before that news conference, that it isn't interested in more passenger service on its tracks.

New passenger service "would likely put freight back on I-35 — increasing gridlock, accidents and greenhouse gas emissions," Mark Bristol, the company's general director of interline operations and network planning, wrote Brown on Sept. 6. "Our Austin- San Antonio rail corridor is a critical freight route in Texas, and available capacity is reserved for the state's future freight transportation needs."

"I encourage you to review the Lone Star Rail District's environmental studies and track designs that made it clear to us that additional passenger rail service, including increased Amtrak service, does not work on this route," Bristol wrote.

Nelson Wolff, who advocated for the Lone Star Rail District while serving as Bexar County judge until Union Pacific pulled its support, once said it would take "God's intervention for us to have high-speed rail." He served as San Antonio's mayor during another failed attempt, in the early 1990s, led by a consortium of U.S., French and Canadian companies known as Texas TGV that envisioned a bullet train linking San Antonio, Austin, Dallas and Houston.

"It crashed," he said of the rail district in a recent interview. " Union Pacific has their right-of-way and they're proud of it and they aren't going to let anyone screw around with it."

"What's going to come of this, I don't know," Wolff said. "I don't know if they're going to be able to pull a rabbit out of the hat or not."

Campaign in its infancy

Even after Union Pacific's letter, rail supporters such as Brown and Havrda say they remain hopeful. Brown, in an interview, said he interprets the letter as Union Pacific's way of establishing a posture until "realistic funding" is presented. He has drafted a letter to state legislators asking that they invest $300 million in intercity rail statewide in the upcoming legislative session.

Along with that stash of federal funding that didn't exist before, they point to other factors lending fuel to their campaign, including a widespread sense that congestion on Interstate 35 has grown intolerable and cannot be overcome by adding more highway lanes.

Traffic counts kept by TxDOT bear out that perception: A stretch of I-35 just north of Loop 1604, near the crossing with Retama Parkway, had an average daily vehicle count of nearly 194,761 last year, according to the agency's website. That's an increase of 36.6% from the count of 141,827 in 2013, and of 60.1% from the count of 121,000 in 2004, the first year for which data is available.

Havrda, who represents District 6 on the San Antonio City Council, which includes much of San Antonio's far West Side, said traffic congestion has reached a "pain point" on I-35.

"We weren't always there. It was an inconvenience to drive to Austin, but it wasn't just a nightmare like it can be now," said Havrda, a mayoral hopeful who is also vice chair of the Alamo Area Metropolitan Planning Organization, or AAMPO, which oversees transportation planning for the San Antonio metro area.

This latest campaign for San Antonio to Austin rail service is very much in its infancy. The most significant step to be taken is Brown and Sakai's formation of a committee, the Texas Passenger Rail Advisory, which meets once a month. They have established contact with Union Pacific, meeting with executives in their Washington D.C. office.

Sakai described the process as an "ongoing conversation," downplaying the possibility that anything substantial might be accomplished in the near future.

"It's just my leadership style — take one step at a time; be very methodical," he said in an interview. "I don't want another high-speed-rail excitement and then find out there's no political will. I believe if we talk very thoughtfully, deliberately and with much strategic planning, we can at least get the public buy-in."

"Can I get it done before the end of my term? Probably not," he said. "But if I can start the train rolling — no pun intended — then I'll let the community figure it out."

'The time is now'

In arguing for investment in passenger rail, former San Antonio Mayor Henry Cisneros points out that in the coming decades the Austin- San Antonio region is set to grow by a number greater than the current population of the city of Chicago.

He's right, according to projections from the Texas Demographic Center, a state agency that tracks Texas's population based on data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

In 2020, the seven counties bordering I-35 between the San Antonio and Austin metro areas — Bexar, Caldwell, Comal, Guadalupe, Hays, Travis and Williamson — had a combined population of 4.5 million, according to the agency. By 2060, the agency projects that their population could double, to a total of 9.1 million, assuming that migration rates continue on the same trajectory as in the decade between 2010 and 2020.

That's an increase of nearly 4.6 million. The Windy City's population last year was 2.7 million, according to the Census Bureau.

In 2060, then, the Austin- San Antonio region could host more residents than now live in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, which hit a population of 8.1 million last year.

Anticipating that growth, the Texas Department of Transportation is working on two major expansions of I-35, one in San Antonio and one in Austin, with a combined budget of $8.7 billion. Work on both is likely to stretch at least into the early 2030s. On San Antonio's Northeast Side, the agency is adding three elevated lanes in each direction, increasing the total number from eight to 14.

Yet the San Antonio expansion is designed to accommodate increasing traffic only as far ahead as the 2040s — when daily traffic counts are expected to approach 400,000 — raising the question of when the interstate will again become overloaded.

Cisneros said he has been trying for years to launch regular bus service between San Antonio and Austin, but has struggled to raise funding. He calls the bus route a "first step" to prove that mass transit can work along the I-35 corridor.

"This takes a concerted effort to work with the railroads, that have jealously guarded those lines for freight," Cisneros said. "But the time is now, with infrastructure money allocated and a clear priority for getting rail built on the national level. Never has there been a moment like this, where there's a realization of what the implications are."

"It's almost transportation planning negligence to think we can rely on I-35," he said. The interstate "is just simply not capable of carrying any further load, and the situation is just going to get worse."

What's in it for Union Pacific?

Union Pacific, a publicly traded company based in Omaha, Nebraska, operates nearly 33,000 miles of rail in the U.S., all west of the Mississippi River, linking cities such as Chicago, New Orleans, Denver, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles and Seattle.

Since the 1990s, it has had something close to a monopoly on rail in San Antonio, owning the roughly 80-mile line to Austin, which passes through the cities of New Braunfels, San Marcos and Kyle along the way.

With so much of the land between San Antonio and Austin already developed, it would be difficult to find the space — known as right-of-way — to wiggle a new line between the two cities while hitting all the booming communities in between.

As a result, the path of Union Pacific's line — hugging I-35 for much of the way — is widely seen as the logical route for a high-capacity passenger line.

As a for-profit company, Union Pacific won't allow more passenger trains on its line unless it makes financial sense to do so. And freight is more lucrative than passenger service — especially on the San Antonio-to- Austin line, which originates in the booming Port of Laredo on the Texas- Mexico border.

The Port of Laredo has lately emerged as the nation's top port, due in large part to the growth of the Texas- Mexico manufacturing ecosystem — with products such as Toyota Tundra pickup trucks assembled with parts from either side of the border — after the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 eased barriers to border trade.

The recent trend of nearshoring — whereby companies shift production from China to North America to avoid tariffs and simplify supply chains — has also fueled the port's growth. Auto parts, home appliances and produce such as avocadoes, berries and tomatoes pass through the port every day onto Union Pacific's line.

The port's growth has increased San Antonio's importance as a hub for freight traffic. After arriving in San Antonio, those Mexican-made products might keep going north on Union Pacific's line through Austin to Dallas, St. Louis and Chicago. Or they might change course onto other branches in the company's rail network, toward Houston or Los Angeles.

"Union Pacific has made very clear from day one that they cannot share their lines that are very profitable at this time," Sakai said. "They will not take a cut in profit in order to accommodate passenger rail."

Union Pacific has made major investments on its South Texas rail network over the years, including $100 million on its 300-acre San Antonio Intermodal Terminal in southwest Bexar County and $90 million on its facility at the Port of Laredo, doubling its size and allowing it to run 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Company spokeswoman Robynn Tysver declined to comment apart from providing the company's letter to Andy Brown and pointing to a joint study conducted by TxDOT, AAMPO and the Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization — AAMPO's counterpart in Austin — on traffic congestion between the two cities which concluded, among other things, that "a significant number of trips only use I-35 to travel one or two interchanges."

The bypass option

The Lone Star Rail District effort, which was started in 2003, did accomplish some things. One of them was a memorandum of understanding and deal points with Union Pacific, signed in 2010. It provided an outline of a deal in which the company agreed to consider relocating its freight line.

The district's three employees drew up plans to lay new tracks east of San Antonio, roughly along the path of today's Texas 130 toll road. After the new rail line was built, plans called for Union Pacific to take it over so the existing line could be devoted to carrying passengers.

The district proposed what it called the Lone Star Rail System, or LSTAR, a 118-mile route stretching from Texas A&M University San Antonio on the South Side to Georgetown, north of Austin, with 16 stations along the way outfitted with "ample parking, comfortable waiting areas and connections to local transit," according to an LSTAR documents. The goal was to offer between 28 and 32 round-trip services each weekday on an improved version of Union Pacific's current tracks.

The project, had it been executed in its most ambitious form, was expected to cost $2.4 billion. The district proposed splitting the bill between taxing jurisdictions along the route.

Joe Black, who served as the district's director, said he still thinks that what he calls the "bypass" option is the most sensible way forward. He now sits on Brown and Sakai's Texas Passenger Rail Advisory Committee, and says he hopes his experience can come of use.

Black says the existing rail line is far from ideal for Union Pacific, with its twists and inclines. A new line could be laid straighter, allowing for greater speeds and higher freight capacity, he said.

The bypass route would also eliminate the nuisance of freight trains snaking through the central areas of San Antonio, San Marcos, New Braunfels and Austin, where they not only block traffic, putting a strain on emergency response services, but pose the risk of catastrophic derailment such as occurred last year in East Palestine, Ohio, Black said.

"I actually saw the bypass, moving the freight trains out of those downtowns, as one of the primary benefits," he said. "The passenger service was kind of the icing on the cake."

Problems with the bypass

But the bypass option has its downsides. For one thing, some major business operations have located along the current line to make use of the freight capacity, including the massive Balcones Cement Plant in New Braunfels.

Acquiring land for the new route would carry a huge cost, possibly requiring the use of eminent domain, which might cause public support to plummet. An effort by a private company to build a bullet train between Dallas and Houston has struggled for more than a decade, largely due to problems with land acquisition.

Other rail advocates are focusing on the option of improving Union Pacific's existing line to allow it to carry more passenger trains, or laying new tracks beside it — though to do that would also likely require land acquisition, with Union Pacific's right-of-way narrowing to about 40 or 50 yards in some locations in Kyle and New Braunfels.

Andy Brown, the Travis County judge, said he wanted to work with TxDOT and Amtrak to figure out how to make those improvements.

A bypass would be "wonderful," he said, but it's important to not get "bogged down in trying to get the perfect solution right away."

"I would like to get what is most achievable, and to me it seems like increasing what we have right now and improving what we have right now is that solution," he said.

What went wrong last time

The Lone Star Rail District's last push for passenger train service was effectively ended in 2016, with a letter sent from Union Pacific to Sid Covington, the district's chairman, terminating the 2010 memorandum of understanding.

After six years of "meetings, discussions and studies," the company had concluded that the goal of increasing passenger service on its San Antonio-to- Austin line was "unattainable," wrote Jerry Wilmoth, then the company's general manager for network infrastructure.

Union Pacific had earlier struck an optimistic tone about the project, with Wilmoth writing in a 2012 letter to then- Travis County Judge Samuel Biscoe that the company believed it had made "substantial progress" and that "an eventual agreement will result in the ability of the District to provide passenger service" and relocation of the company's freight traffic onto a bypass route.

But Nelson Wolff, who then was serving as Bexar County judge, recalls meeting with the then-CEO of Union Pacific, Lance Fritz, who told him definitively that the company would not allow more passenger service.

Wolff said he urged Fritz to make the company's position public, leading it to send that letter, which effectively brought an end to the Lone Star Rail District. In the following months, many of the municipalities that had joined the effort withdrew their support.

"Their freight had picked up substantially over the years and it is of course profitable. Passenger lines are not that profitable, if profitable at all," Wolff said.

Ross Milloy, who worked closely with the district as president of the Greater Austin-San Antonio Corridor Council, described Union Pacific's as "the worst transportation decision since the Donner Party took the Hastings Cutoff."

As the time, the district was within about a year and a half of getting final environmental approval from the federal government, which would have opened the door for federal funding, he said.

"For years they had been telling us that it was a good idea for them to get out of this corridor — that they wanted to get out of this corridor," he said of Union Pacific. "I don't think they're a rational actor. I think they have so many other issues going on."

Signs of hope for rail

Though TxDOT focuses nearly all of its resources on building and maintaining roads and highways, it plans to study the possibility of running three passenger trains per day on the Union Pacific line using the existing Amtrak stations in Austin and San Antonio, agency spokesman Adam Hammons said in an email.

Depending on how the study goes, TxDOT might apply to get the route into the Federal Rail Administration's Corridor Identification and Development Program, which could make it eligible for a slice of that $66 billion in funding, Hammons said.

The Federal Rail Administration has already selected routes between Houston and San Antonio and between Dallas and Houston under that program, awarding them grants of up to $500,000.

According to Brown's letter to the legislature, the federal government could foot 80% of the bill for the project's costs, with the state covering the rest — which is why he and others are eager to win an appropriation in the upcoming session, beginning in January.

But the funding request could have a hard time gaining traction in a session that is likely to be dominated by debates over school choice, reducing property taxes and securing the state's water supply, said Matt Mackowiak, a campaign consultant and chair of the Travis County Republican Party.

Mackowiak predicted the recent "intramural squabbling" among Republicans — including between Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Dade Phelan — could lead to a "defensive" session in which few bills are passed.

"My hesitance really revolves around the timing. This is not expected to be a session where a lot of things are going to get done," he said.

Given the astronomical growth of Austin and San Antonio and the inadequacy of I-35, Mackowiak said he could imagine a rail project gaining bipartisan support among the region's legislative delegation.

Even in that case, it would likely take more than one session to gather momentum for the project in the legislature, he said.

"It would give this effort a decent chance of success over the medium-term," he said. "Generally these things don't happen in one session. They take more time."

The legislature is a "difficult environment" for rail, especially after the controversies surrounding the Dallas-to- Houston project, said Milloy, who also sits on Brown and Sakai's Texas Passenger Rail Advisory Committee.

Amtrak, the federally funded corporation that manages inter-city passenger rail in the U.S., is throwing some of its weight behind the project. Among those who rode the Texas Eagle last month was Andy Byford, who last year became Amtrak's senior vice president for high-speed rail development after serving as president of the New York City Transit Authority and commissioner of transport for the city of London.

While on the train, he filmed a Facebook video with Brown, saying that Amtrak has "big plans for Texas — all three sides of the Triangle." He was referring to the Texas Triangle, the booming region bounded by San Antonio, Dallas and Houston.

"We'll certainly need political support. We'll need buy-in from the state," Byford recently said in a television news interview, speaking of rail projects across Texas. "There's a lot of lobbying to do. There's a lot of talking to officials, a lot of meeting with advocacy groups, to make sure that everyone understands the benefits and what the prize is."

Also among the train's passengers was Emmanuel Loo, deputy secretary of economic development for the Mexican state of Nuevo León, which borders Texas and includes the city of Monterrey, a major trading partner with San Antonio and South Texas. At the news conference, he spoke of seeking a "new alternative" for cargo and passengers to get from Nuevo León to Texas.

The new Mexican president, Claudia Sheinbaum, has announced a plan to expand passenger rail throughout Mexico, including to Nuevo Laredo, across the border from Laredo.

Cheerleaders for the Austin- San Antonio line point out that other municipalities have managed to strike deals with Union Pacific to boost passenger service, including between Chicago and St. Louis and on the Capitol Corridor route between the Sacramento and Bay Area in California.

"I've never had anybody tell me they thought this was a bad idea. All of the studies showed that people wanted it," Milloy said. "I think it has to happen. Mainly, because you just can't continue to load population growth and NAFTA trade onto Interstate 35."

___
(c)2024 the San Antonio Express-News
Visit the San Antonio Express-News at www.mysanantonio.com
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.