Even with eminent domain the government has to pay fair market value compensation. In Texas rural land prices are $30k and up per-acre, going up quite a bit fo

Even with eminent domain the government has to pay fair market value compensation. In Texas rural land prices are $30k and up per-acre, going up quite a bit for more desirable land. The land between Dallas and Houston is fertile and valuable, and much of it is also oil country. Oil producers probably wouldn't mind ceding some land to a train project, but farmers and homesteaders absolutely would mind, and you can expect lawsuits for years and years. The land between San Antonio and Austin is more expensive since it's all already an urban corridor, so the train would have to track West, except that West isn't feasible because it's Hill Country, so it would have to track East, but East is also quite urban/suburban as well. The further East you go, the better the land is for farming, the more it's worth. The land between Houston and SA/Austin is quite valuable because, again, it's a long corridor of small towns with lots of very fertile land (all of it being East of I-35). The land between Austin and Dallas is drier -so less valuable- and fairly flat, but still there's a lot of towns between DFW and Austin. This is probably the cheapest land to acquire for this project. Just the land costs for this would be enormous. And conventional train tracks cost on the order of $1m/mile at least, with high-speed train tracks costing more. Because high-speed rail needs to be straighter and flatter, there will be more constraints on what land could be used, and geographic constraints will be more costly. On the plus side Texas is now willing to tax businesses more in order to tax residents less. That might lead to the state being willing to raise the funds for this project, but I guarantee you it's going to be extremely contentious.