The Texas Eagle at 50: Train serving East Texas is key to future of commerce, travel in Longview

Fanfare greeted the return of passenger rail service at every stop it made in East Texas early on March 14, 1974 — 50 years ago Thursday.

Crossing over from Arkansas, the train stopped in Texarkana, Marshall and then Longview. Griff Hubbard, who was tasked with preparing each of those depots for the return of passenger service, recalled that dignitaries from each city would join the train at the previous stop before it arrived in the next city.

In Longview, the afternoon newspaper, The Longview Daily News, described a crowd of 500 to 800 people waiting for the train’s arrival in town shortly before 5 a.m. that day. The Longview High School band performed.

The newspaper reported that Longview sent a delegation of 50 people who boarded the train in Texarkana earlier in the morning, and the newspaper published a commemorative edition to mark the train’s arrival. Then-Longview Mayor Pro Tem Bobby Smith presented a copy to an Amtrak official, and photos show that Longview’s original radio station, KFRO, was on hand to cover the event as well.

“That’s the same time that I made the transition from (working) for the Texas and Pacific Railway to Amtrak,” Hubbard recalled during an interview this week. “My first compensated work was on March 8, 1974, six days prior to the inaugural train. My job was to see that the stations at Texarkana, Marshall and Longview were sufficiently renovated by the inaugural run.”

They were ready, he said, laughing, but not if anyone looked “too closely” or turned “the bright” light on the structures.

“It was down to the wire,” he said.

Hitting the rails

Hubbard was the first Amtrak agent in Texarkana but also worked in Marshall and Longview until he moved full-time to Longview in 1983.

His railroad career spanned 52 years before he retired, but he has remained connected to the industry — including through his railroad history podcast, “I’ve Seen Some Trains Before,” which is available on his YouTube channel.

When Amtrak starting serving the area, East Texas had been without passenger rail service for about three years. Previously, it was provided by the Texas and Pacific Railway, which was absorbed by the Missouri Pacific Railroad in 1976 and later the Union Pacific.

“I wanted to get into passenger service,” said Hubbard, who has longtime family ties to the railroad. But those “legacy freight carriers” had exited that line of business.

The Texas Eagle’s 50-year history started on the heels of the creation of what became Amtrak.

Former President Richard Nixon signed the Rail Passenger Service Act on Oct. 30, 1970. That created the National Railroad Passenger Corp., which later became Amtrak. The act tasked the company with the responsibility of providing intercity passenger service.

Congress later called for the creation of a route that ended in Laredo and was supposed to connect with service into Mexico. That train was called the “Inter-American” but later became the Texas Eagle.

The route has changed through the years, but it remains the United States’ longest train route, according to Amtrak.

Trains originate in Chicago and Los Angeles, making stops in Illinois and California as well as Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.

“As the name suggests, there are many stations in Texas and you can also ride this train to reach Phoenix, Tucson and Palm Springs,” according to the Amtrak Guide website.

A train stops twice a day in Longview on the way to and from Dallas. Longview’s depot is located at the Longview Transportation Center, an intermodal transportation center where train passengers also can catch a bus to Houston or board the city’s bus system.

“Longview is extremely fortunate,” Hubbard said. “Very, very few mid-sized, medium-sized cities still have the big three intact — commercial air service, inter-city bus service and commercial passenger rail. That is a rarity across America. What also is a rarity is for a medium-sized city such as Longview to have a truly intermodal rail passenger station.”

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Ridership increases

More people rode the Texas Eagle during the budget year that ended Sept. 30 than they did the year prior. Along its entire route, the train saw 16% growth in ridership to 294,439 passengers, said Amtrak spokesman Marc Magliari. That total included 44,876 riders at the Longview station and 7,233 at the Marshall station.

“The fact is not everyone could, can and should drive,” Magliari said, referring to people driving from Longview to Dallas. The cost of flying to Dallas is much more expensive than a train ticket. Rates for train service to Dallas start at $8 and go up to $54, Magliari said.

“That is a whole lot cheaper than a plane ticket would be,” he said, and that’s without considering the cost of gas or the wear and tear on a person’s vehicle.

Hubbard said he does have a concern about the Texas Eagle as it operates today.

The train consisted of two engines and eight cars, with a full-service dining room, in 2018, he said. In the years since the pandemic, it has operated with one engine, four cars and no full-service dining.

“It’s the only train west of the Mississippi River which doesn’t have [a full-service dining room],” Hubbard said, adding that all the routes saw equipment reductions after the pandemic.

Magliari acknowledged that Amtrak doesn’t have enough cars in service.

“When COVID came, and no one really knew what was going to happen next, we parked a fair amount of rail cars” because of the reduction in business that Amtrak experienced, he said. All of the company’s western trains are smaller than Amtrak officials would like them to be.

“We’re going to put more than 50 cars back in service this calendar year,” he said. “It’s easier to park them than to take them out of mothballs. We’re putting them back in service as quickly as we can.”

He said Amtrak will be able to order new train cars thanks to the federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. He didn’t have a specific time frame for when cars could come to the Texas Eagle route.

“We’re working, of course,” he said.

Expansion in the future?

Hubbard said he is hopeful that rail service will expand in the future. Now more than ever before, there’s a better chance that four trains could travel daily between East Texas and Dallas — and add service providing rail access from East Texas to Shreveport and on to Atlanta, Georgia.

That’s because of groundwork laid decades earlier that recently led to grant funding being awarded to the Southern Rail Commission. The funding is necessary for expansion planning.

A lot of things have to come together, Hubbard said, but he encouraged people to imagine what that kind of service could mean: working in Shreveport while living in Longview or working in Dallas while living in Longview. Longview could have the level of service already available in other parts of the country.

“I’ve always believed — in fact, I was taught to believe — that rail passenger service is the economic and industrial growth vehicle of the 21st Century,” he said.

“It is no secret that commercial airlines want out of the short-haul market,” he added, referring to service between Gregg County and Dallas or Tyler and Dallas, for example.

That’s why rail service is important to the area’s future.

“Today’s Texas Eagle remains a solid footprint for that future to be built on,” he said.