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Texas Central Partners is planning to build its 240-mile high-speed rail line between Houston and Dallas along a utility corridor which runs through Freestone County, Texas, seen here on Jan. 31. 2018, near Fairfield, in a small community of Cotton Gin.

Central Texas residents raise their hands at a public hearing Jan. 31, 2018, in Fairfield to show opposition to a plan by Texas Central Partners to develop a 240-mile high-speed rail line between Houston and Dallas.

The Texas Supreme Court on Friday gave the go-ahead to beleaguered plan to build a bullet train connecting Houston and Dallas, ruling that companies behind the project have the power to acquire private property through eminent domain. .

In a 5-3 ruling issued Friday, the high court said that Texas Central Railroad and Texas Logistics could indeed be considered as an “interurban electric railway companies” under state law, even though they have yet to build a railroad, and may never do so.

The decision culminates a years-long legal battle, launched by landowners along the bullet train’s route shortly after project was proposed. One of them, Leon County rancher James Fredrick Miles, filed suit in 2016, after Texas Central sought to survey the roughly 600 acres he owns along its “preferred” route—land which would be bisected if the bullet train is built.

The case turned on what it means to be a “railroad company” or “interurban electric railway company,” which have eminent domain authority under the state Transportation Code.

On HoustonChronicle.com: Critics say the idea of a Houston-Dallas bullet train could be over

Miles, along with other property owners argued that Texas Central didn’t qualify because it wasn’t operating a railroad and may never do so. Texas Central has yet to build any tracks or train stations, or acquire the Japanese Shinkansen railcars called for in the project proposal.

The project’s proponents, however, argued that this line of reasoning yielded a chicken-and-egg problem that would make it impossible to ever build a rail line.

A trial court sided with Miles. A court of appeals in 2020 overturned that ruling, leading Miles to petition the Texas Supreme Court for review. Friday’s ruling affirms the appellate court’s ruling.

The Greater Houston Partnership, a business-financed economic development group, hailed the decision. “Faster, safer, and more reliable connections between our region and other parts of Texas are vital to our continued economic growth,” the group said in a statement.

But the bullet train’s future is unclear. On June 14, Carlos Aguilar, who has served as the company’s CEO since 2016, announced in a LinkedIn post that he would leave the company, writing, “I could not align our current stakeholders on a common vision for a path forward.” Opponents, including U.S. Rep. Kevin Brady, R-The Woodlands, interpreted Aguilar’s resignation as a sign the project was dead.

The Texas Supreme Court’s ruling implicitly acknowledged the controversy surrounding the project, and the likelihood it will persist —at least, if Texas Central does.

“The case involves the interpretation of statutes relating to eminent domain,” wrote Justice Debra H. Lehrmann. “It does not ask us to opine about whether high-speed rail between Houston and Dallas is a good idea or whether the benefits of the proposed rail service outweigh its detriments.”

Erica Grieder is a business reporter for the Houston Chronicle.

She joined the Houston Chronicle, as a metro columnist, in 2017. Prior to that she spent ten years based in Austin, reporting on politics and economics, as the southwest correspondent for The Economist, from 2007-2012, then as a senior editor at Texas Monthly, from 2012-2016. In 2013, she published her first book, "Big, Hot, Cheap, and Right: What America Can Learn from the Strange Genius of Texas." An Air Force brat, Erica thinks of San Antonio as home. She is a member of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas's Emerging Leaders Council, and holds degrees from the University of Texas at Austin's LBJ School of Public Affairs and Columbia University, where she majored in philosophy.

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