Texas High Speed Rail Faces a New Threat: Semantics

For rail fans who cling to the dream that the United States will someday boast the high-speed rail systems that much of the rest of the world enjoys, the plan to bring bullet trains to Texas has been something of a ray of hope. Texas Central Railway, the private company helming the effort to connect Dallas and Houston in a zippy 90 minutes via Japanese shinkansen technology, says it will be ready to break ground as soon it receives its safety and environmental permits, which could be as soon as late 2019. The company now has more than $450 million of backing, and its scheme is largely proceeding without the kind of political drama and cost overruns that have consumed California’s L.A.-to-S.F. undertaking.

But Texas Central does have a few legal and procedural disputes to clear up first. Currently, some of the opposition to the project focuses on an oddly existential question: whether the company is a railroad at all. “Simply self-declaring that you are a railroad does not make it so,” Kyle Workman, the president of the opposition group Texans Against High-Speed Rail, told the Houston Chronicle in February.