Texas Central Seeking Federal Funds to Jumpstart the Texas Bullet Train Project
Way back when Texas Central was first formulating its plans to construct a highspeed rail line that would tote passengers between Houston and Dallas in just 90 minutes, company officials made vague, broad promises that they would not be seeking any federal funding to construct the Shinkansen railway.
However, that’s a claim that Texas Central folks have steadily moved away from over the past decade as the company has managed to obtain regulatory permits and backing that have inched the project ever closer toward becoming a reality, as we noted in our story back in 2017.
Thus, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise now that Texas Central has recently announced that it is currently seeking $12 billion in federal loans to help fund the project’s estimated cost of about $20 billion. If the loan goes through it will be the largest one in the history of the Railroad Rehabilitation and Improvement fund’s history, gobbling up more than a third of the $35 billion debt limit Congress has set on the fund.
Of course, politicians who have been lobbying against the construction of the rail line since word of the plans to build the Japanese-created bullet train first started going around in 2015 have been quick to criticize Texas Central for going after the federal funds. U.S. Rep. Kevin Brady, a Republican representing The Woodlands, decried the move, which makes sense since some of the landowners who have been most vehemently opposing the highspeed rail line are in the rural sections of the state located between the edges of Houston and Dallas.
Read more: https://www.houstonpress.com/news/federal-funds-to-jumpstart-the-texas-bullet-train-12262819
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