Anyone who has driven I-45 between Dallas and Houston knows it’s a cruise-control-friendly 240 miles of mostly flat, straight and semi-scenic highway, with no sizable towns in the 145 miles between Corsicana and Conroe.
This same fairly level, largely unpopulated terrain would also be well suited to the construction of a railway, with relatively affordable real estate and rapidly growing cities at either end (the Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan areas ranked first and third, respectively, among the fastest-growing populations nationally last year).
So it’s perhaps unsurprising that there’s momentum to build a Dallas-Houston high-speed rail line, which could boast America’s first super-fast “bullet trains.”
A private local company called Texas Central Railway is promising to connect Houston and Dallas with 205 mph bullet trains built by Central Japan Railway Co. (also known as J.R. Central), the company behind Japan’s proven “Shinkansen” system of high-speed trains.
