The company hopes to run rail service into each city's downtown. Commuting at 205 miles per hour

A Texas company hopes to create a high-speed rail corridor to move passengers at speeds that would leave Amtrak’s Acela in the dust — all with private funds.

Texas Central Railway, a private company working with Japan Railway Co., wants to build a closed high-speed rail corridor served by a bullet train that would get people from Dallas to Houston — the Lone Star State’s two biggest cities — in 90 minutes. The company is eyeing a 2021 date for starting service, and though the exact route isn’t yet pinned down, the company is hoping the rail line will run from downtown to downtown.


Richard Lawless, Texas Central Railway’s chairman and CEO, said the company is now raising capital to fund the development stage of the proposed railroad, preferably without any federal or state money. He wouldn’t reveal the company’s investors but said that may come soon.

The company won’t be competing for any grant money from the public coffers, Lawless said, and it won’t look to the government to subsidize any part of the operational expense of the system.

“Absolutely not, we will not look to any government or public entity to subsidize the farebox,” Lawless said.

But he left the door open to looking to the feds for other kinds of help, such as financing for the project. Lawless did not address the costs of building the line, but some estimates have put construction at $10 billion.

“It wouldn’t be appropriate for us to rule out anything that would benefit the project. I think what we’re saying is we’re going to look at whatever is available to private companies in general and whatever private companies have availed themselves of in the past, we would look at doing so.”

But Lawless stressed that would simply be kept open as an option, and that the rail project “certainly doesn’t need to do it that way.”

He said the company wants to proceed without federal or state money strings because it allows them to move at the speed of a private business.

“The government obviously has regulatory responsibilities,” Lawless said.

Involving the government as minimally as possible is important because “the higher the level of government involvement, the more delay necessarily that the project is encumbered by, the more complex it becomes and ultimately the more costly it becomes.”

It’s an ambitious project. TCR would run a Japanese-style bullet train, likely the current N700 Shinkansen. The company is eyeing a standard operating speed of about 205 mph along a dedicated closed-track system that would eliminate the need for grade crossings. That’s compared to the Acela’s top speed of 165 mph.

Lawless said fares on the bullet train would be pegged to the current average airfares between Houston and Dallas. Considering that the cities are 240 miles apart — right in the sweet spot where reliable fast rail service is preferred to other modes of travel — that might give the airlines a serious run for their money.

But he said the economics of the state’s growth are such that it’s not a zero-sum game.

“There’s plenty of opportunity on this corridor for people to move in different ways, and if people still choose to go the air route, or choose to spend five or six hours on the road driving, that’s their choice,” Lawless said. “It’s not a question of capturing all those people that are trying to move between those two cities.”

Lawless said the company has evaluated other city pairs in Texas, but selected Dallas-Houston as a proving ground.

“The important thing for us is to prove the economic and business concept of Dallas-Houston in a very straightforward way, and we want to do that as reasonably quickly as possible,” Lawless said. “And then I think the sky’s the limit.”