San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Mexico officials say rail plans back on track
Interest in S.A.-to-Monterrey train drives feasibility study, fuels hope
For more than three decades, politicians and rail advocates have dreamed of building a passenger train link between San Antonio and Monterrey, northern Mexico’s largest city.
Each time, they’ve woken up with no financial commitments or concrete development plans.
Nevertheless, top Mexican rail officials are back at it.
They plan to begin a $2 million feasibility study for San Antonioto-Monterrey service by the end of 2021. It will examine the potential costs of building and operating a rail line, and gauge passenger demand for service between the two cities, which are 300 miles apart.
“We need to prove that train service between the two cities can be a success,” said David Camacho, head of Mexico’s Regulatory Agency for Rail Transport.
But Camacho already sounds convinced, touting the advantages of fast train travel that results in less pollution than the cars and trucks that clog the border crossing in Laredo.
Federal, state and local officials in the U.S. and Mexico have talked about a rail link since the late 1980s. Among the proposals was a high-speed rail line that would allow passengers to travel between San Antonio and Monterrey in two hours.
In 1992, then-San Antonio Mayor Nelson Wolff joined mayors from Laredo, Nuevo Laredo and Monterrey in endorsing a rail link between the two countries. In 2000, Amtrak said it was planning a route from San Antonio to Monterrey.
And in 2017, a joint U.S. Federal Railway Administration-Texas Department of Transportation study offered the possibility of frequent train service on the I-35 corridor between Oklahoma City and Laredo, with a possible extension to Monterrey.
The study included the possibility of as many as six high-speed trains shuttling between San Antonio and Monterrey per day.
But Texas lawmakers never applied for federal matching funds that could have kick-started development of Oklahoma-Texas rail service, let alone the link to northern Mexico.
A humbler approach
Mexican officials say they are taking a more realistic approach. They have scrapped the idea of building a high-speed line. Instead of considering trains that would travel at speeds up to 250 mph, they’re examining conventional rail with a maximum speed of 100 mph.
Amtrak’s once-a-day Texas Eagle — which starts in San Antonio and ends in Chicago — has a top speed of 79 mph.
The lower speeds mean less expensive locomotives, and the trains could use existing tracks. Camacho estimates that approach would bring the project’s cost to about $7 billion, down from an earlier estimate of $20 billion for high-speed service.
The time the journey takes would depend on the number of stops on the line. Mexican rail officials are envisioning five — in San Antonio, Laredo, Nuevo Laredo and two in Monterrey.
They see the Amtrak station in downtown San Antonio as the potential stop here. But the terminal is little more than a waiting room, not a full-fledged station to start a journey to Mexico.
The trip from San Antonio to Monterrey would take about four hours, Camacho said.
“Trips by airplane are efficient when they are longer trips, but for fewer hours, trains have the advantage,” he said.
On the Mexican side, the link could be built without acquiring property, according to Camacho. The passenger line would run on existing tracks for freight trains between Nuevo Laredo and Monterrey. The track is operated by the Kansas City Southern Railroad.
Camacho said the Mexican government owns the right of way for the tracks and could double-track some of the route to allow the passenger trains to get around slower-moving freight trains.
But he said the Mexican rail agency has not contacted the Kansas City Southern Railroad,
which also owns the tracks between San Antonio and Laredo, about sharing the tracks in the U.S.
Who would pay?
Who would fund the project? Would Mexico be willing to foot the entire bill? Camacho insists private-sector backers would be interested.
“We are going to show how investors can recover their money,” he said.
He envisions service that would run as often as every halfhour between the two cities, linking the economies of San Antonio and Monterrey.
U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, DLaredo, who has pushed for the cross-nation train between Texas and Mexico since 2008, said the Mexican rail agency’s involvement can help the project become a reality this time. He said Mexico’s 5-year-old Regulatory Agency for Rail Transport didn’t exist when previous proposals were made. There was no coordinating central force in Mexico to advocate for the rail link.
“This will give us the impetus to do it,” he said.
Cuellar helped secure the budget appropriation of more than $6 million for the 2017 I-35 corridor passenger study.
He’s attempting to win House approval for an amendment to the $1.1 trillion federal infrastructure bill, which has passed the Senate, that would allocate $1.5 million per year for a study of the potential San Antonio-to-Monterrey rain link over the next four years.
But, he conceded, given Texas lawmakers’ reluctance to fund passenger rail, matching federal funds may be hard to obtain.
“A lot of this will have to be private investment,” he said.
Cuellar said when he first proposed the San Antonio-to-Monterrey link in 2008, the first calls were from Six Flags Fiesta Texas and SeaWorld San Antonio officials. They were tantalized by the possibility of trains delivering a large number of Mexican tourists to their theme parks.
President Joe Biden’s infrastructure plan includes about $66 billion for Amtrak, the federally chartered rail agency. The ambitious plan proposed by Amtrak calls for more U.S. rail service, but it doesn’t include a San Antonio-to-Monterrey rail link.
Texas rail advocate Garl Latham said the Mexican government’s consideration of trains that travel faster than conventional trains in Texas — yet aren’t deemed high-speed rail service — is logical.
“It’s here that the Mexicans are showing far more common ‘horse sense’ than their U.S. counterparts,” he said noting numerous plans for American high-speed trains have died over the years.
Obstacles
Of course, any project would require the cooperation of U.S. officials — even if it was funded entirely by Mexican interests. A host of challenges would have to be overcome, including common operating standards for the crossborder passenger service and the creation an expedited border crossing for train travel between the two countries.
Camacho said passengers could clear customs at the boarding train station to avoid lengthy waits at border crossings. Cross-border service, Cuellar said, wouldn’t work unless passengers are precleared for customs before boarding the train.
Camacho said he’s had several meetings with the U.S. Federal Railway Administration as well as the Texas Department of Transportation about the San Antonio-to-Monterrey service.
“They believe it’s a good project. They want to see the Mexican side step forward and complete the study,” he said.
Camacho said the study could take up to a year to complete.
He believes train service could start in five to 10 years.
A Federal Railway Administration spokesman would not comment on the meetings, except to say the Mexican and U.S. rail agencies discuss rail safety matters and how to facilitate freight trains at the seven U.S.-Mexico border train crossings.
TxDOT’s top rail official said the department’s last meeting with Mexican officials was about two months ago.
“They have a reasonably realistic approach to how to plan for this thing. So where it goes from here, we’ll see,” said Peter Espy, TxDOT’s director of rail.
Mexico once operated an extensive passenger rail service. But the government privatized the service in 1995, and almost all of the last long-distance trains were dropped.
Until the mid-1960s, it was possible to board a railroad sleeping car in St. Louis and travel to Laredo. At the border, the rail car was then transferred to the Mexican rail system, with a new train taking passengers all the way to Mexico City.
Wolff, now Bexar County judge, said San Antonio has struggled for two decades for rail service. It hasn’t even been able to develop regular service to Austin, 70 miles to the north.
But he said the Mexican proposal seems realistic and could be a boon to the San Antonio area.
“I don’t know how many people who live here are from Mexico, but it’s a bunch,” he said. “And then you look at retail sales. If the Mexican nationals came, these malls would do very good. The train could play a big role in our economy.”
Camacho said passenger rail service between the U.S. and Mexico will come back and his rail agency fully backs the plan.
“I believe that today we have a more diverse bunch of people here that understand the potential and the greatness of the railway system,” he said.