I ride the Texas Eagle out of Austin, so I know what little it offers: one train a day, at an hour nobody wants, chronically short on cars. It is the only train serving both Austin and San Antonio. Even so, its ridership rose over 14% last year, part of a record year for Amtrak nationwide, and the corridor’s stations together moved more than 100,000 boardings and alightings in fiscal 2025.
That is the appetite one badly timed train produces.
The demand for movement in this corridor is not a mystery. The Texas Department of Transportation counts 266,000 trips on a typical weekday between Austin and San Antonio. That’s more than six times any other city pair in the Texas Triangle (spanning Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio, and Austin), none of which exceeds 43,000 trips a day.
Austin is spending $1.6 billion to rebuild its convention center, a bet that visitors will come and a downtown worth arriving in. San Antonio is pouring hundreds of millions into its own downtown and a new sports and entertainment district. For now the only way between them is by road.
Travis County Judge Andy Brown and Bexar County Judge Peter Sakai co-founded the Texas Passenger Rail Advisory Committee in 2024 specifically with the mandate of addressing this increasing demand in our corridor. The committee recently reviewed two studies. The first uses an existing freight line and would carry riders between both downtowns in about 95 minutes for roughly $2 billion, with trains running throughout the day rather than the single morning departure we have now. The other runs from downtown San Antonio to the Austin airport in approximately one hour for around $13.5 billion.
The cheaper route runs on Union Pacific’s track; the railroad walked away from an earlier plan a decade ago. But the new study took that head-on, with passenger trains on their own dispatching, added passing track, and freight growth accounted for rather than ignored. The faster route avoids Union Pacific entirely by utilizing state-owned right-of-way. There is more work ahead on both, engineering, environmental review, and the ridership modeling that is still underway.
Critics will say a 95-minute train is no different from the drive. A car covers it in 75 minutes at 2 in the morning and well over two hours in Friday traffic. On the train I open my laptop and the trip becomes time that counts; my job lets me work the ride like any day from home. But you don’t have to work it. You can sleep, eat, read, watch the miles go by. The point isn’t what you do with the time, it’s that it’s yours. Behind the wheel that time is gone, spent on the road whether you want to spend it there or not.
Rail needs public support to run, the way every mile of the interstate already does. Texans will be paying to move people through this corridor either way. The only question is whether we keep paying for one mode or build a second.
Texas has a rail fund. Not a single dollar has been appropriated to it since voters created it over 20 years ago, even as the 2021 federal infrastructure law put tens of billions on the table. The terms are the same ones Texas takes without blinking for highways: Washington covers 80%, the state covers the rest. For rail, Texas has continually refused even that, and the money went to states that said yes. The Legislature meets again in 2027. Tell your state representative and senator it’s time to bring regular rail service to the Texas Triangle, starting with Austin and San Antonio.
Jakob W. Schmidt is a Downtown Austin resident and Austin community liaison for Texas Rail Advocates.
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This article appears in July 10 • 2026.