Quote:
Originally Posted by electricron
And if all it takes for Texas Central is to own tracks and a train to be declared a railroad so it can have eminent domain powers, the City of Dallas has lots of land to sell in the Trinity River wetlands where miles of tracks can be laid and a train can be run.
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This argument doesn't pass the sniff test. Texas Central is an entity explicitly formed for the purpose of building and operating train service. Y'know, a
railroad. The kind of pretzel logic required to claim Texas Central isn't a railroad is mind-boggling. The body of law created in the 1800s and 1900s to deal with railroads still applies if somebody wants to build a new greenfield railroad. If Texas wanted to rescind that power, or restrict it to only railroads existing as of 1940 and their successors, they had literally decades to do that and they chose not to.
The City of Dallas is a municipal corporation with many, many different functions, so your hypothetical is a straw man. If an entity wanted to hypothetically declare themselves a railroad to abuse the power of eminent domain for other purposes unrelated to rail service, I'm sure Texas law provides a path for each of those takings to be challenged in court since they were done in bad faith. Even 100 years after the initial taking has occurred, the original use of eminent domain to create railroad rights-of-way is still a major barrier to the abandonment of those lands and the sale to private owners, since that land was always intended for quasi-public use. That's why rail-trails became so common, because they preserve public use of the land while also discouraging squatting or other illegal use of the land.
Also, the argument that the state will be forced to step in if Texas Central goes bankrupt is another fallacy. If Texas Central goes bankrupt, any construction work that is completed could be purchased by another company, either to run Houston-Dallas passenger service or for different purposes altogether (e.g. freight service). I'm sure UP, BNSF or KCS would love to get a grade-separated corridor at a deep discount. Or it could simply be abandoned. In no case is the State of Texas or its taxpayers responsible for the railroad, unless they actively choose to accept responsibility - and even then the structures and earthworks could be used for other public uses like a trail or a highway, which would be subject to public approvals at every step along the way.
Lastly the opposition to this project seems pretty hypocritical when rural lawmakers usually support pipelines or highway bypasses in their district, which also require the use of eminent domain. The message here isn't really "eminent domain is an abuse", the message is "we just don't like trains or the people who ride them".