SPECIAL BRIEFING: Can Texas avert the last flight of the Heartland Flyer?’ [00:00:00] This is a Powering America special briefing. I'm Brian Hyde. Today, a story about one of the most basic questions in American infrastructure: who pays to keep the lights on? Or in this case, who pays to keep the train running? It's a story about a single passenger rail line just over 200 miles long that's having the best year of its life and may not survive the year Let me introduce you to the Heartland Flyer. It's an Amtrak train, one round trip a day, every day, connecting Oklahoma City and Fort Worth, Texas. Two hundred and six miles of track. It's been running since nineteen ninety-nine, and for a lot of people along that corridor, it's not a novelty, it's the only option. It is the only passenger rail link between Oklahoma City and Fort Worth. It's usually cheaper than flying, and it drops you off in the center of the city, not at an [00:01:00] airport thirty minutes outside of it Here's the part that makes this story interesting. The Heartland Flyer just had a record year. In fiscal year twenty twenty-five, it carried a record eighty thousand seven hundred sixty-seven passengers, and it pulled in a record two point four million dollars in ticket revenue. That's according to a Lone Star Standard report just last week. Record riders, record revenue, and it might get shut down on August thirty-first. So how does a train with its best ever numbers end up on the chopping block? The answer is the way these things are paid for. The Heartland Flyer is a partnership. Oklahoma covers part of the cost. Texas covers part of the cost. Amtrak runs it. Oklahoma has done its job. It has secured its share of the funding through fiscal year twenty twenty-seven. Texas has not. The Texas legislature did not include money for the Heartland [00:02:00] Flyer in the state's twenty twenty-six to twenty-seven budget. And the Texas Department of Transportation has told Amtrak, in effect, that another suitable funding source has not been identified. So the Texas money runs out August thirty-first, and without it, the train doesn't run. The irony writes itself. Demand has never been higher. The product is working, and the thing standing between this train and the tracks isn't ridership, it's an appropriation that didn't get made. Now, you might be thinking, it's one train. How much does this really matter? Consider the timing. Americans are traveling in huge numbers, and most of them are doing it by car. Over this past Memorial Day weekend, roughly forty-five million Americans were expected to travel at least fifty miles from home, and about thirty-nine million of them were going by car. And it's getting more expensive to be in that car. Gasoline prices rose more than twenty-eight percent [00:03:00] between April of last year and April of this year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. AAA clocked the average price of gas at $4.56 a gallon heading into last week, a four-year high. So picture the corridor, Interstate 35 between Oklahoma City and Fort Worth, packed. Gas near five bucks a gallon. And the one alternative, the train that takes you city center to city center for less than a plane ticket, is the thing facing the budget axe. By the numbers, the Heartland Flyer takes the equivalent of about fifty thousand vehicles off Interstate 35 every year. Lose the train and a lot of those trips don't disappear, they just move onto the highway, into the traffic and the fuel bills we just talked about. And then there are the people who don't have another option at all. An Oklahoma transportation official who manages the state's multimodal division put it plainly to a public radio station. For people who can't drive, can't [00:04:00] afford to, or simply won't, if they want to take surface transportation down to the Fort Worth area, the Heartland Flyer is the one other choice they've got. That's the quiet part of an infrastructure story like this one. A funding line on a state budget spreadsheet is also a senior who doesn't drive anymore, a student, a family that can't swing airfare. The train isn't an amenity for them, it's access. And here's a piece of this story that hits a particular kind of fan because it shows up every fall. Every October, the University of Oklahoma and the University of Texas meet in Dallas for the Red River Rivalry, one of the biggest games in college football, pulling tens of thousands of Oklahoma fans south across the border. And for years, a whole lot of them have gotten there on the train. It's called the Big Game Train. For the rivalry weekend, Amtrak extends the Heartland Flyer for fans heading to the game. No I-thirty-five, no hunting for parking near Fair [00:05:00] Park, no white-knuckle drive down with everybody else. Recent years even added a sightseer lounge car with floor-to-ceiling windows for the ride. Fans could hop on in Norman, Purcell, Pauls Valley, Ardmore, Gainesville, Fort Worth, and roll in together. It's been one of the most affordable and frankly most fun ways to make that trip. And now that tradition sits under a cloud. With Texas pulling its share of the money and the long-term future of the whole route in question, the Big Game Train is one of the things that could disappear. Lose the Heartland Flyer, and you don't just lose a daily rail link, you lose the rolling tailgate that's carried Crimson and Cream fans to the rivalry year after year. Those riders go back to the interstate, back to the parking hunt, back to the gas pump we talked about earlier. It's a small thing, and it's not a small thing. It's part of this story you can actually picture, a packed train car full of fans on an October morning [00:06:00] that may not roll much longer. So here's where it stands. The Heartland Flyer is more popular than it ever has been. Oklahoma has paid its share. Texas has not. And the clock runs out August thirty-first. After that, the future of the only passenger rail connection between Fort Worth and Oklahoma City is frankly an open question. It's a small story that tells a big one about how America decides on what infrastructure is worth keeping and what happens when success on the tracks runs headfirst into silence at the State House. We'll keep watching the calendar on this one. August thirty-first. For Powering America, I'm Brian Hyde. Thanks for listening.