Lone Star Rail District to pursue Central Texas regional commuter rail

Money and tracks needed

Vilas Bhuchar, Nov 30, 09.

As of last month, a San Marcos-based government agency hoping someday to run passenger trains between Williamson County and San Antonio is now called the Lone Star Rail District, according to a the Austin American-Statesman.

Agency officials have said the train line will be called the LSTAR, but the Statesman’s Ben Wear wonders when trains will actually run:

Because a dozen years after the Legislature authorized it, the train service is still mostly a line on a map. As agency board chairman Sid Covington says, the main obstacles to creating a commuter line between Austin and San Antonio are now and always have been Union Pacific freights and money.

According to the story, the LSTAR would run on existing Union Pacific tracks, which means almost all of Union Pacific’s freight runs - at times more than two dozen freight trains per day - would have to be moved to new or refurbished tracks east of the existing tracks. The story elaborates on the potential costs involved in this process:

Rerouting the Union Pacific trains from Taylor, according to a 2008 Texas Department of Transportation study, would cost anywhere from almost $900 million — if the bypass extended only to south of San Marcos — to $2.4 billion to go to San Antonio’s south side. The rail district last year was saying that construction of the line itself would take another $600 million.

Wear wonders where funding will come from and reports that the Lone Star Rail District is hoping that TxDOT and Union Pacific will split the cost of the alternate freight route.  According to the Statesman, the plans for passenger rail construction include “16 stations, trains, track and signal improvements, maintenance facilities - Lone Star officials see TxDOT paying half, the other half split roughly in thirds among governments in the Austin area, Bexar County and Comal and Hays counties.”

The rail district will receive $40 million from the Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization and the San Antonio - Bexar County Metropolitan Planning Organization for design work and the environmental process. According to the Statesman, the district previously existed on an annual budget of $7.7 million of congressional earmarks. Studies should begin early next year.

Off the Kuff notes that a proposed map is available at the San Antonio Express News.

(Photo Credit: Jim Frazier)

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