Riding the Rails: Mexico to Add Passenger Train Routes
Tara A. Spears
Oh yah, another opportunity for a scenic road trip through Mexico- from the comfort of a passenger train! It has just been announced that the government has slated building a train station in Puerto Vallarta and adding a passenger route from there. This is great news for Jaltemba Bay because the proximity of PV makes it an easy day trip.
This week the Mexican government proclaimed that a passenger rail renaissance of six projects is to be completed prior to 2024. Four are under way, with about a dozen more passenger train routes planned. If completed, these new trains would mean life-changing shorter commutes and faster transportation for the millions of post-pandemic tourists who are expected to travel throughout the country each year. The environment, too, could benefit from the thousands of polluting cars and buses that trains would pull off the roads for decades to come.
Historically, Mexico hasn’t had an expansive national rail network. The back story of Mexican rail service: The country’s first railway was conceived in 1837, when the president at the time granted a Mexican businessman a concession to build a line from the Gulf coast port of Veracruz to Mexico City. The Mexican railways were nationalized in 1937 by then-president Lázaro Cárdenas, a year before the expropriation of the oil industry, and run by the state for the next six decades.
According to National Geographic, by the time the government decided that private companies would do a better job of maintaining and improving the country’s railways, passenger travel by train from one city to another was virtually unheard of. In fact, the private concessions were only granted for freight service, with few exceptions such as the journey through the picturesque Copper Canyon and the tourist train connecting Guadalajara with the agave-growing town of Tequila. Passenger rail travel was removed from Mexico’s consumer price index around the same time that bottled drinking water was added.
Service on the handful of Mexican routes where passenger travel was still available into the 1980s was somewhat typical of a state monopoly in its last throes—bad. Air travel was still prohibitively expensive at that time for many people, but highway expansion made bus routes more convenient, and significantly faster than the rail services being offered.
The continuous lack of investment and failure to modernize by the state-owned railways happened, in part, as the proliferation of roads, bus companies, and air routes burgeoned, putting all but made an end to long-distance rail passenger traffic in Mexico.
One of the intentions of the previous administration led by president Peña Nieto (2012-2018) was to begin restoring long-distance passenger rail travel to Mexico, and it began that year with big plans for a bullet-train from Mexico City to Querétaro, including a future extension to Guadalajara; as well as a trans-peninsular passenger train line joining the Yucatán state capital city of Mérida with the popular tourist region of Riviera Maya.
From the outset the projects were criticized as being unprofitable, which they evidently would be, but that wasn’t the point: the plan was to reignite the rail industry and recreate a modern high-speed passenger train network capable of reducing travel times along what have become highly congested highways and give passengers more choice in travel.
The administration led by president López Obrador (2018-2024) has prioritized some train schemes as part of its program of governance, but none that are likely to rekindle national passenger train travel in any meaningful sense. 
The federal government has taken over the Mexico City-Toluca high-speed train project, which is behind schedule and way over budget; it is now expected to be completed in 2022. The administration is also funding a tourist train line around the Yucatán peninsula called Tren Maya—a project that has been the object of much criticism, but the president remains uncompromising in his support of it.
For the present, if completed, these new trains would mean life-changing shorter commutes and faster transportation for the millions of post-pandemic tourists who are expected to travel throughout the country each year. The environment, too, could benefit from the eliminating thousands of polluting cars and buses that trains would pull off the roads for decades to come. Traveling by train would enable tourists to see more of Mexico’s breathtaking scenery. 