Landowners speak out after Texas Central resurfaces with Amtrak partnership on potential high-speed rail.
Story by Jena McRell
Video by Ben Humphrey
Before Jim and Barbara Miles assumed ownership of their ranch near the small Central Texas town of Jewett in 1993, they made a promise.
It was a promise to veteran Leo Batto and his wife, Marion, that the land the couple originally purchased after World War II with money from the GI Bill would be protected and preserved. The Battos were steadfast in their desire to keep the 800-acre property together as a working cattle ranch — a livelihood they cherished and a passion they shared with Jim and Barbara.
“Our roots run very deep in Leon County,” Jim says. “We promised the Battos we would never sell this property or see it fall victim to multi-tract developers, and we intend to keep that promise.”
While the two couples were not blood relatives, they were united in their love of the land and its history. Jim says one of his prized possessions is the property’s original Spanish Land Grant documents that Marion gifted him.
And yet, there are circumstances threatening to ruin the future of this property and many others in the region.
Located about 15 miles west of I-45 between Dallas and Houston, Jim and Barbara’s It’ll Do Ranch sits at the heart of one of the state’s most contentious private property rights battles. For nearly a decade, a company of investors called Texas Central Partners LLC has claimed it plans to construct a privately funded, high-speed rail linking the two major cities. The train is proposed to run the 240-mile route in roughly 90 minutes.
In theory, the concept was easily marketed as beneficial to the state. But landowners living along the train’s proposed route — those whose homes and livelihoods stand in the balance — demanded answers beyond Texas Central’s surface-level descriptions.
Individuals and families, including Jim and Barbara, rallied together and formed Texans Against High-Speed Rail, a 501(c)4 organization dedicated to the protection of private property rights.
The group has spent countless hours questioning and speaking out against the project’s lack of transparency regarding budgetary estimates, environmental impacts and ridership metrics.
Over the years, Texas Central’s predicted construction costs ballooned to $30 billion-plus. Those opposed say it is highly unlikely that the project, if it sees the light of day, will remain privately funded or generate a profit.
“They can’t rely solely on private investment on a train going from Houston to Dallas and tell me it’s going to pay for itself,” Jim says. “The purchase of electricity alone would be outrageous.”
Challenged with these financial woes, growing opposition and the resulting COVID-19 economic downturn, Texas Central effectively closed its doors in 2020. The acting CEO resigned, and the company went silent for years.
Then in August 2023, Michael Bui, an asset manager hired to salvage the remains of Texas Central, announced a tentative partnership with Amtrak to further research the potential for high-speed rail between Dallas and Houston.
While the project faces years of hurdles before tangible progress could be made, landowners are not sitting idle.
“We do not believe this will ever be a viable project, but this latest reincarnation can’t be ignored,” Barbara says. “For us, protection of property rights means never letting our guard down when it comes to those who are intent on taking them from us, no matter how remote the possibility.”
Eyes on Amtrak
It’s a marathon, not a sprint. Texans Against High-Speed Rail Executive Director Desi Burns Porter says that has been the organization’s message since day one of the effort to combat Texas Central’s proposed high-speed rail.
Porter says the August 2023 announcement that Texas Central and Amtrak are partnering to resurrect the project came seemingly out of nowhere.
“There is a renewed sense of concern, but there’s also a renewed sense of resolve to stand up for their private property rights — and their tax dollars,” she says.
Texas Central and Amtrak jointly applied for and have been awarded a $500,000 federal grant. The funds will likely be used for research to determine any salvageable elements of the project, Porter explains.
“What we’ve heard from Amtrak is that that’s not necessarily a guarantee that they’re going to pursue the project,” Porter says. “Not much has changed except for the worst for Texas Central, because of the lack of ridership and political appetite to spend money on something with such a bad reputation at this point.”
Throughout the next 12 months, the project is expected to crawl at the same slow pace it’s maintained the last decade. Although the presence of Amtrak, and their goal to establish a full system of high-speed rail within the U.S., should not be taken lightly.
Tactically speaking, the next step for Texas Central is to apply for a construction permit through the Surface Transportation Board, the federal agency responsible for authorizing the construction of new interstate railroads.
“We’ve been told by the Surface Transportation Board that even though Amtrak is now potentially involved, that doesn’t mean there’s going to be a rubber stamp for any sort of permit,” Porter says. “We will absolutely be involved in that process to make sure the board is aware of all the landowner issues and concerns.”
Dreams rattled
In 2014, Porter and her young family were making plans to build their forever home on 10 acres near Montgomery when they first heard about the high-speed rail. Their property was on one of Texas Central’s proposed routes.
“When we learned about the project, it was truly heart-crushing and dream-crushing,” Porter says. “We had just built our barn and were living in it while clearing the property, and so it was very traumatic.
“Then you had families who have had their property for generations or those quarter-acre-lot homeowners who have invested everything they own into that — all of us were facing the same type of heartache and stress.”
After reaching out to neighbors, Porter says they quickly realized a need to get organized. Texans Against High-Speed Rail was officially launched in 2015. With support from the Beckham Portela Law Firm, the group serves as a resource and advocate for property owners.
Texas Central eventually landed on its preferred route, which runs about eight miles from Porter’s house and not directly through their property, but she says they remain active in opposing the project because they know how it felt to be in that position.
“From the beginning, there were issues with private property rights,” Porter says. “They [Texas Central] were trying to survey properties without documentation, no permits from any entity. There was a lot of reason to pause and start digging deeper.”
The bullet-train concept was not new for the Mileses. The couple had spoken out against a similar attempt in the 1990s to survey land and acquire properties for a Dallas-Houston line.
The project threatened Jim and Barbara’s former ranch residence off U.S. Highway 79. The train would’ve gone right through their living room.
In the days before the Internet and social media, Barbara says they banded with neighbors, made phone calls, printed t-shirts and bumper stickers, and hosted meetings to spread the word about the real impacts on landowners in rural Texas.
Faced with such opposition, the project never made it off the ground.
“We were able to stop that one and never really thought that we would have to fight something like that again,” Barbara says. “But 30 years later, and they’ve come knocking on our door.”
The impact
With Japan as a main investor in the Texas Central project, the high-speed rail would employ the Japanese Shinkansen technology, which is used in the country’s bullet train between Tokyo and Osaka.
According to project proposals, the rail line and right-of-way would be about four miles wide, and require roughly 9,000 total acres of land. Portions of the tracks would be either elevated on concrete viaducts or 20-foot-high earthen berms.
More than 1,700 landowners would lose property as a result of the project, reported the Federal Railroad Administration’s final environmental impact statement. Porter says many more would be impacted by construction activities and rerouting county roads.
The statement also reported nearly 3,600 acres of special status farmland would be taken out of production and 200 agricultural structures would be destroyed.
“As a state, nation and world, we can’t afford to have agricultural production taken away at that rate,” Porter says.
Many farmers, ranchers, wildlife managers and other residents say little regard has been given to them when dealing with Texas Central’s representatives.
Barbara says questions concerning water runoff and the resulting erosion, restrictions on animal or equipment movement, and the major environmental shift that would take place have been waved off as inconsequential.
Because cattle are known to hear a much wider range of sound frequencies than humans, the added noise could be particularly stressful to the herd. This applies to wildlife, too.
Along with fellow cattle raisers, the Mileses have spoken out about the significant impacts on their way of life. Their ranch would be essentially split in two.
Jim says they would have to re-route 15 miles to feed cattle; access to water would be cut off in places, making some pastures useless; and it would be increasingly difficult to rotate stock and check fences for repairs.
Looking out across their pastures of lush grasses and towering trees, some of them 18-foot-diameter Water Oaks dating back centuries, Jim and Barbara remember their dear friends the Battos and the dreams they forged together.
“The high-speed rail as it is proposed would devastate this place,” Barbara says. “You can’t live next to something like that and not suffer the consequences. We would lose our livelihood and the security of our forever home.”
Legal battles
Early on, the threat of eminent domain was among the tactics Texas Central used to persuade property owners into signing over their land. Jim and Barbara, represented
by Dallas-attorneys Blake Beckham and Patrick McShan of Beckham Portela, challenged this notion all the way to the Texas Supreme Court.
In 2016, the 87th District Court of Leon County ruled that Texas Central was not operating a railroad or interurban electric railway under state law — a necessary threshold to establish eminent domain authority in this instance. Texas Central appealed, arguing they should be considered an operational railroad since the day the company was incorporated.
After a two-year wait, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the 2016 ruling. In July 2020, Jim petitioned the Texas Supreme Court to review the case.
Nearly two additional years later, after many emotional highs and lows for the Mileses and other property owners, the state’s high court offered its final ruling: a 5-3 decision affirming the court of appeal’s decision. The majority wrote that Texas Central met an early 1900s-era definition for operating interurban electric railways.
Despite never having managed a functional railroad, no construction permit for the high-speed rail project or, at the time of the Texas Supreme Court ruling, no corporate board of directors, Texas Central was granted the power of eminent domain.
“It was a real gut punch because we had always seen the Texas Supreme Court as a protector of private property rights, and they did not do that with our case,” Barbara says.
While the high court decides whether or not a company fits a definition, only members of the Texas Legislature determine what entities can be granted eminent domain authority.
During the 2023 Regular Session, talks of new policy to effectually reverse Texas Central’s position were heard in the House Transportation committee, but time ran out for the bill to advance.
Another legality to note is, through policy passed in 2017, Texas law prohibits any use of state funds for private high-speed rail.
Texas & Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association has stood alongside Texans Against High-Speed Rail in the effort to combat the proposed Texas Central project. Through legislative advocacy and writing an amicus brief for the Miles’ case, Porter says the association has been a valued partner when speaking out for private property rights and landowner protections.
“We are not just protecting the private property rights of those between Dallas and Houston, but for all Texans,” Porter says.
“If this project is allowed to proceed and private property rights continue to be trampled as they have been, there won’t be any hesitation to do the same to other private property owners in another area.”
At what cost?
For those not impacted by the project, the prospect of traveling 90 minutes from Dallas to Houston for a Mavericks’ game or the stock show offers novel appeal.
But like all things, it comes with a cost.
In this case, a significant hit to the state’s agricultural producers, land stewards and precious open spaces. Porter says that is the most devastating of all, when the convenience of getting to a sporting event supersedes the physical and emotional investment made by rural landowners.
“The fact that it’s reduced down to that is really difficult to hear,” she explains. “That’s why we like to share as much information as we can, so they can understand we had reason to scratch the surface and try to learn more. And once we did, it became very clear that this was not what it was made out to be.”
Porter emphasizes their fight is not against the idea of high-speed rail in general. It is about this specific project that has been riddled with controversy and misinformation since the beginning.
The Mileses and many other landowners across the state agree.
“Even if this were not directly affecting our property, we would be against this project,” Barbara says. “As presented, we do not think it’s good for our county and we don’t think it is good for our state. If realized, its negative impacts will be felt for generations to come.”
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This story first appeared in the January 2024 issue of The Cattleman magazine.
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