The Brazos Corridor

Continuing our look at High-Speed Rail in Texas, today we’re getting to the fun part: intercity travel. As you recall in the long series of previous posts, for the sake of this series I’m imagining a privately owned and operated rail system. As a private enterprise, the rail system would need to start small, building regional links that would align with planned future high-speed intercity service.

So far we’ve illustrated lines stretching from Galveston in the southeast to Tomball in the northwest. Today let’s extend the line from Tomball to College Station.

Making the connection requires about 60 miles of new track through fairly empty countryside. The route shown heads from Tomball to Magnola, then shifts slightly more to the west to hit Navasota on its way up to College Station.

At first glance this may seem unorthodox – after all, the existing primary connection to College Station is via US-290 and SH-6. Why take a different route?

Well, there are a few reasons:

First, this route is a little shorter (about 88 miles as compared to about 95 for the 290 route). In the big scheme of things 7 miles of track isn’t a deal breaker. However, when you consider an existing track running through Tomball, the connection to Tomball is much shorter than creating a new track extending all the way from College Station to Northwest Crossing via 290. See the previous post for reasons why the commuter rail should go to Tomball instead of running parallel to 290.

Second, this route avoids existing highways, which means land prices will tend to be lower. For a private-enterprise this is a big difference maker. The only real way to make a private train system work is to buy land along the route for the construction of new towns in-between destinations. The development of these new towns provides both a steady stream of passengers for the train and an infusion of capital to offset the cost of building the train.

This last point is critical to understand: one of the biggest reasons to build an intercity rail system is to help attract compact, focused growth in new towns and second-tier cities like College Station or Waco. Rapidly linking these second-cities to the major hubs would greatly enhance their role as incubators for small business and lead to significant new growth in those places.

Somewhere around here I expect people are going to start writing me comments like: “But that’s just going to make sprawl worse! What are you thinking??”

This isn’t necessarily the case – in fact, in the case of a private rail operator it’s VERY UNLIKELY to be the case. In order to ensure the maximum return on investment, a private rail operator would have a huge interest in creating a walkable, transit-oriented town. Providing a lot of parking at the train station is an unnecessary expense if the entire surrounding community is situated within a 5-10 minute walk of the station. The goal would be to create towns that are essentially new versions of places like this:

The photo above is of Giddings, a small town on 290 between Houston and Austin. Giddings is a classic “train town,” complete with the historic Main Street and simple grid. I picked it for this photo because I’ve always liked passing through Giddings, but most of the small towns in Texas would serve as an adequate example.

The cost of providing heavy-traffic infrastructure in a private development is very high compared to the cost of providing small streets that are primarily intended for pedestrians an cyclists. A fully private land company operating as an extension of a rail operator would almost certainly design this way.

This still represents growth in the countryside, but there’s nothing wrong with that. The creation of beautiful, compact new towns is a fantastic alternative to conventional suburban development.

Now the ever important question is, how fast would the train be? We should assume that the intercity trains would be faster and a little less frequent than the regional trains, and that they would operate service in two tiers. First there are the express trains, operating with very few stops, and then there are the regional service trains, operating with a large number of stops.

In the configuration above I’ve assumed that the intercity trains can reach 250 MPH (as opposed to 150MPH for commuter service), and that they stop with the doors open for 1 minute (as opposed to 20 seconds in regional service). 60 seconds is a shorter stop than most conventional trains use, but remember that we’re imagining an alternative technology that favors a higher frequency of small trains instead of low frequency long trains. Also, keep in mind that the stops are the biggest cause for delay, so minimizing stop time through intelligent design of the platforms and trains is critical to keeping travel times low.

In this scenario, the regional service trains could travel roughly from the Texas A&M campus to Tomball in about 30 minutes. At that point the trains would probably continue as standard commuter service and head into Downtown Houston.

Express service, on the other hand, would be much faster. See the table below for approximate travel times.

Highlights:

• Texas A&M to Downtown Houston: ~ 30 Minutes
• Texas A&M to the Strand: ~55 Minutes

In other words, it’s blazing fast. This kind of service, even with a moderate number of stops to enable greater local access, takes about 1/3 the time of driving.

That time reduction is critical in order to compete in a market where the vast majority of people already own cars and are already used to driving between these destinations. If the train doesn’t offer superior service (ie, it’s faster, even if you have to drive a few minutes to get to the station), it won’t be successful.

So that’s a quick look at how a regional system could be extended to the first leg of an inter-city system. Coming up next we’ll look at the other sides of the triangle and how their regional and inter-city systems might develop. In the mean time, I’m looking forward to hearing everyone’s comments. As always, please read the previous posts in the series before commenting on this one – there’s a good chance that your questions have already been answered.