The hits just keep on coming for Texas Central, the company behind the controversial project to construct a bullet train that would allow passengers to zip from Houston to Dallas in about 90 minutes.
Renfe, the Spanish railway company tapped as a “strategic partner” with Texas Central Railway in 2018 and then as a designated “early operator” in, is calling it day. The company, which oversees more than 9,000 miles of railway routes in Spain, has announced its withdrawal from the project. Renfe has also liquidated its American subsidiary, Renfe of America, at a loss of 4.5 million euros (about $5.2 million), making it crystal clear they’re out of the game.
In another world, one where Texas Central had federal backing and never ran afoul of both local and state officials, this wouldn’t be such a big deal. After all, although Renfe had been helping with the planning and providing technical guidance, Texas Central might be able to get other highspeed rail operators to work with them. But in this reality, the entire project has been a slog for years now, and in the past few months, the situation has only gotten worse.
Texas Central’s proposal to partner with Central Japan Railway (the purveyors of the shinkansen technology that is slated to be used for the train line if it ever gets built) back in the 2013 was always going to be controversial. To construct a train line, then estimated to cost about $20 billion, that would tote passengers 240 miles between Houston and Dallas, the project would need to acquire land from the landowners that lived in the rural expanse in between the two cities, a move that was never going to be popular in those areas.
Instead, the company got fierce opposition and struggled to get enough private, and later public, funding to allow them to purchase all the land required to build the thing while the estimated cost of the line ballooned to about $40 billion.
By the time the Texas Supreme Court ruled that Texas Central could use eminent domain to acquire the land it needed, the then-CEO had abruptly departed and the board had dissolved itself. All signs indicated that the bid for the Houston-to-Dallas bullet train had gone bust.
Until 2023 that is, when Amtrak, with backing from the Biden administration, swooped in with a plan to partner with Texas Central and inject enough funding to get the project going once again.
And throughout 2024 the signs seemed favorable, right up until President Donald Trump came back to power.
In April, the Trump administration’s emphatic resistance to highspeed rail (and, seemingly, anything that the Biden administration had opted to back) saw the federal government yanking a $64 million planning grant it had previously awarded to Amtrak back, as we’ve previously noted. U.S. Transportation Secretary (and former reality TV actor) Sean Duffy went out of his way to slam the project, calling it “a waste of taxpayer funds” and stating that it should be built by the private sector “rather than relying on Amtrak or the American taxpayer to bail them out.”
However, at about that same time Kleinheinz Capital Partners emerged as Texas Central’s new backer, having bought out Japanese investors, who reportedly lost about $270 million on the project.
In spite of, well, everything, the Fort Worth-based investment group has maintained a sunny optimism about the project, calling Amtrak’s conscious uncoupling with Texas Central “good news overall for the project.” They’ve also maintained their stance that the project is “shovel ready” even though Texas Central only owns about 25 percent of the required land so far.
And who knows, maybe they’ll be right. Texas Central has proved that “mostly dead” can still mean “slightly alive” before. Maybe, with Kleinheinz Capital — an investment company headed by John Kleinheinz, a longtime backer of the project — behind them, they’ll do so again.
That said, Houstonians who have been dreaming of the day when they won’t have to drive up I-45 for hours to hit Dallas, will most likely be dreaming for some years to come – unless they spring for a plane ticket.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2025.
