Dallas and Houston are just 250 miles apart. But by train, it took contributor Benton Graham 23 hours to travel between the two cities, on a route that first took him from Dallas to San Antonio for an eight-hour layover before continuing on to his final destination. The trip would have been shorter by bike, according to Google Maps.
Graham’s journey says a lot about the state of passenger rail in many parts of the US, where decades of falling ridership and service cuts have derailed the network’s efficiency — and where efforts to improve speeds are often thwarted by politics. For Graham, there is at least one silver lining: “Taking the train through Texas might not be the fastest…” he writes of his own experience, “but it’s definitely the most social.” Today on CityLab: Where Train Dreams Meet Reality in Texas