A proposed revival in passenger train service between Nogales, Sonora, and Mexico City is generating excitement among potential users in Mexico and Arizona, while raising concerns its construction could skirt environmental regulations.
Since taking office Oct. 1, Mexico’s new president Claudia Sheinbaum has shared more details of her plan to build more than 3,000 kilometers of passenger rail along three new routes from Mexico City. That includes two proposed lines to the border cities of Nogales and Nuevo Laredo, across the border from Laredo, Texas. A third, shorter route would connect Mexico City and Pachuca.
The proposed route to Nogales includes stops in cities such as Querétero; Guadalajara; Mazatlán, a coastal city in Sinaloa; Culiacán; Los Mochis; and Sonora’s capital of Hermosillo before reaching Nogales, said Andrés Lajous, Mexico’s new director of the agency that regulates the country’s railway transport, ARTF.
Construction should begin next year, Lajous told the Star in an interview.
“The objective is to have all these services in operation at the latest by the end of the administration,” in 2030, he said in Spanish.
The passenger rail reforms are aimed at improving security and quality of life, reducing Mexico’s carbon footprint as well as traffic crashes, and connecting isolated communities to the rest of the country, Sheinbaum’s administration has said.
Sonora Gov. Alfonso Durazo has told Sonoran media the return of passenger rail — which has been little used in Mexico since the railroads were privatized in the 1990s — would be “an extraordinary thing,” linking Nogales with the small town of Estacion Don on the southern border of Sonora.
In a statement to the Star, Durazo’s office said, “Sonora will once again have this mode of transportation that will further empower tourism in the region and the arrival of new visitors who wish to live the experience and tour Sonora’s attractive landscapes from aboard the train.”
Officials hope the new passenger line will boost tourism to Sonora’s beach towns and “Pueblos Mágicos” — towns recognized for special cultural or natural significance — including San Carlos, about 130 kilometers (80 miles) from Hermosillo, the statement said.
Details are still scarce. News outlets have reported the new passenger trains will run on electric power, unlike the country’s diesel-powered freight trains. But Lajous said those decisions are still being finalized.
Since taking office Oct. 1, Mexico’s new president Claudia Sheinbaum has shared more details of her plan to build more than 3,000 kilometers — nearly 1,900 miles — of passenger rail along three new routes from Mexico City. One route would be from Nogales, Sonora.
The new passenger trains will likely be similar to Mexico’s “Maya Train” project, which is partially electrified, and should run at speeds of more than 160 kilometers (about 100 miles) per hour, Lajous said.
Up until the 1990s, passenger-train service between Nogales, Sonora and the beach town of Mazatlán was popular, especially favored by young tourists on spring break, said Luis Ramirez, who runs a Phoenix-based consulting firm focused on cross-border issues, infrastructure and binational coordination.
“Certainly for our region, the use of passenger rail would be a huge boost for a number of reasons,” both addressing security concerns for tourists on Sonora highways and improving ease of travel, he said.
Former Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador said in a July news conference that Sheinbaum intends to build twice the amount of rail lines as he did in his six-year term.
“This is going to mean a lot of jobs,” he said.
Critics question if there’s sufficient demand to justify Mexico spending billions more on passenger rail, which López Obrador has made a priority for his and Sheinbaum’s political party, Morena.
López Obrador’s train projects include the controversial $30 billion Tren Maya, on the Yucatan Peninsula; an “inter-ocean” railway connecting the Pacific and Gulf coasts; and a commuter railway linking Mexico City to the city of Toluca.
The costly projects contributed to the López Obrador administration’s budget deficit of nearly 6% of GDP this year, the Associated Press reported.
‘Engineering marvel’
Douglas native and long-time borderlands researcher Raquel Rubio-Goldsmith was about 6 years old in the early 1940s when she took her first train ride through Mexico.
The passenger train from Nogales to Guadalajara took her family through “fabulous” scenery, traversing the western Sierra Madre mountain range, passing coastal views in Sinaloa and roaring through dozens of thrillingly dark tunnels, recalled Rubio-Goldsmith, the now-retired founding director of the University of Arizona’s Binational Migration Institute.
“It was the most exciting thing you could imagine,” she said. “It was an absolute engineering marvel, (crossing) these huge canyons, that were spanned by bridges, that went down thousands of feet.”
Rubio-Goldsmith said her father worked for Southern Pacific railroad company, giving her family access to train passes through Mexico. They took numerous trips to visit family in Mexico City, changing trains in Guadalajara. When Rubio-Goldsmith studied in Mexico City in the 1950s, she visited her U.S.-based family via train, and later visited Mazatlán by train with her husband, she said.
A passenger looks at the passing jungle landscape while traveling on the Maya Train from Cancun to Valladolid, Mexico. Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s newly elected president, has plans to expand passenger rail service from the border community of Nogales, Sonora to Mexico City.
“You’d get on at about 5 p.m. in Nogales and arrive in Mazatlán at 9 or 10 o’clock the next morning,” she said.
By the 1960s, as oil companies pushed for greater use of buses and more highway construction, the trains were already falling into disrepair, she said.
Mexico’s government privatized the rail lines in the 1990s, which led to a dramatic reduction in unprofitable passenger service in favor of cargo freight.
In an Oct. 9 news conference, Sheinbaum emphasized that the constitution gives the government the right to use existing train tracks for passenger rail. In October, Mexico’s Congress voted to formally return control of railway services to the government.
The move followed López Obrador’s 2023 decree, making passenger trains a priority for national development. In his six-year term, López Obrador added 2,240 kilometers —1,392 miles — of rail for passenger trains, Lajous said during an Oct. 9 news conference.
Today, about 7.5% of Mexico’s railways offer passenger service, he said.
Environmental concerns
Environmentalists say they fear the new rail projects could repeat the Mexican government’s past failures to conduct environmental impact studies before railway construction begins.
Alejandro Olivera, senior scientist and Mexico representative at the Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity, pointed to the Tren Maya, criticized for its route through fragile ecosystems, destruction of ancient cave systems and displacement of Indigenous communities.
Another controversial train project — an extension of an existing train route between Guaymas and Nogales — also failed to conduct required environmental assessments, he said.
Residents of Imuris, Sonora, have been fighting for more information about the new cargo line that has bisected their town, displacing residents, and will cut through El Aribabi Conservation Ranch, where jaguars, ocelots and black bears have been spotted, the Star has reported.
A Mayan Train worker waits for passengers to board in Cancun, Mexico. New Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has plans to expand passenger rail service, including a route from Nogales, Sonora, to Mexico City.
Durazo has emphasized that the so-called “ghost train” is a project of the Mexican Army, not the state of Sonora, but residents who protested against the new railway say they’ve been unable to get answers about the project from any level of government.
Starting under López Obrador, the Army has been allowed to bypass normal permitting and environmental standards while taking the lead on major infrastructure projects. In 2021, Lopez Obrador passed a law stating that projects of importance to “national security” would not have to submit impact statements until up to a year after they start construction, according to the Associated Press.
Olivera said he hopes Sheinbaum, a climate scientist, won’t continue her predecessor’s disregard for court rulings and critical environmental protections.
“These new train projects represent an opportunity for President Sheinbaum to break with this practice and not follow the same strategy of evaluating environmental impacts after destroying valuable ecosystems,” Olivera said. “We hope that they will not repeat this strategy and will act with respect for the environment, without authoritarian orders that ignore it.”
The AP reported Sheinbaum’s plan will involve army engineers directing private contractors to build passenger lines along the same rights-of-way currently used by private concessionary operators to move freight.
Lajous told the Star that planning work for the projects includes environmental impact studies. But he said most of the new passenger service tracks are expected to run parallel to existing cargo-train tracks in areas that are “already environmentally impacted.”
Priorities questioned
Some observers say the massive investment in passenger trains without undertaking a cost-benefit analysis indicates misplaced priorities for a country already in dire need of updated infrastructure for services like water, sewer and electricity.
Sheinbaum’s focus on passenger trains, instead of addressing less “flashy” concerns such as inadequate infrastructure, poverty and education, is misguided, said Lucinda Vargas, economist, professor and research collaborator at New Mexico State University’s Center for Border Economic Development.
“The capriciousness of the previous president is being continued by the current president,” she said. “They’re costly projects and just like we saw with the Tren Maya, are not really being properly planned and executed, in my opinion.”
Passenger travel could also disrupt the transport of cars, Mexico’s top export, if cargo-rail lines have to share right-of-way with passenger service, she said.
Lajous said the goal is “not to share the tracks (with cargo trains) but to have paths dedicated to passenger services,” he said.
Vargas said, other than large-scale movement of migrating people through Mexico, who often ride north atop a notoriously dangerous cargo train known as “The Beast,” “I don’t see continuous, regular demand for the connection between deep, interior south of Mexico and extreme north of Mexico.”
“They’re trying to, in my view, recover a romantic past that is no longer viable,” she said.
