Riding the rails

Full speed ahead: 2020 set as target date for 205 MPH bullet train betweenDallas and Houston

The 250-mile trip between Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston made in 90 minutes or less? Texas Central High-Speed Railway leaders say it's possible, without public financing and within the next eight years.

And they exuded confidence about it at a high-speed rail forum in Irving on Tuesday, reports the Associated Press.

"We are not the traditional state-run railroad," said Robert Eckels, president of Texas Central High-Speed Railway and former Harris County judge. "This is designed to be a profitable high-speed rail system that will serve the people of these two great cities and in between and, ultimately, the whole state of Texas."

Tracks would go over, under or around car and pedestrian traffic to take advantage of the bullet trains' 205-mile-per-hour capabilities.

If this all sounds familiar, that's because it is: Talks of the quick trans-Texas trip have been underway since 2010, when Central Japan Railway Company (JR Central) rallied for part of an $8 billion federal grant that President Barack Obama set aside for high-speed rail corridors.

That effort failed, but JR Central has teamed up with the Texas-based company to raise roughly $10 billion in private dollars for the DFW-to-Houston route. Eckels believes federal involvement slows the process and piles on expenses and claimed that private money would be repaid by riders' fares, which would be "competitive and, in many cases, less than airfares."

Tracks would go over, under or around car and pedestrian traffic to take advantage of the bullet train's 205-mile-per-hour capabilities and would stop in College Station — and perhaps a few other locations between North Texas and Houston — for minimal interruptions.

Although no timeline has been announced for phase one, Eckels said that a second phase of the project would link Austin and San Antonio to the system along the I-35 corridor.

unspecified

Jobs report

Texas ranks among 10 best states to find a job, says new report

Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash

You have a better chance of landing a job in Texas than in most other states.

If you’re hunting for a job in Texas amid a tough employment market, you stand a better chance of landing it here than you might in other states.

A new ranking by personal finance website WalletHub of the best states for jobs puts Texas at No. 7. The Lone Star State lands at No. 2 in the economic environment category and No. 18 in the job market category.

Massachusetts tops the list, and West Virginia appears at the bottom.

To determine the most attractive states for employment, WalletHub compared the 50 states across 34 key indicators of economic health and job market strength. Ranking factors included employment growth, median annual income, and average commute time.

“Living in one of the best states for jobs can provide stable conditions for the long term, helping you ride out the fluctuations that the economy will experience in the future,” WalletHub analyst Chip Lupo says.

In September, Gov. Greg Abbott announced Texas led the U.S. in job creation with the addition of 195,600 jobs over the past 12 months.

While Abbott proclaimed Texas is “America’s jobs leader,” the state’s level of job creation has recently slowed. In June, the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas noted that the state’s year-to-date job growth rate had dipped to 1.8 percent, and that even slower job growth was expected in the second half of this year.

The August unemployment rate in Texas stood at 4.1 percent, according to the Texas Workforce Commission. Throughout 2025, the monthly rate in Texas has been either four percent or 4.1 percent.

By comparison, the U.S. unemployment rate in August was 4.3 percent, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 2025, the monthly rate for the U.S. has ranged from 4 percent to 4.3 percent.

Here’s a rundown of the August unemployment rates in Texas’ four biggest metro areas:

Austin — 3.9 percent
Dallas-Fort Worth — 4.4 percent
San Antonio — 4.4 percent
Houston — 5 percent

Unemployment rates have remained steady this year despite layoffs and hiring freezes driven by economic uncertainty. However, the number of U.S. workers who’ve been without a job for at least 27 weeks has risen by 385,000 this year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in August. That month, long-term unemployed workers accounted for about one-fourth of all unemployed workers.

An August survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York showed a record-low 44.9 percent of Americans were confident about finding a job if they lost their current one.

This story originally was published on our sister site, InnovationMap.

job market texas wallethub jobs