Back in his inauguration speech in December 2012, incoming Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) (a socialist party that has increasingly governed as centrist), said that he planned to restore national passenger rail service to Mexico, over a decade after his own party discontinued it, despite passanger rail being an integral part of Mexico’s history up until then.
The Washington Post earlier this week took a look at Peña Nieto’s rail proposals, among them a $4.5 billion high-speed rail connecting Mexico City and Santiago de Queretaro, a manufacturing center located 120 miles northwest of Mexico City. The plan calls for 100,000 passengers to be traveling on the high-speed rail line by 2016.
As the Post reported:
His proposals start with the completion of a rail line across the Yucatan Peninsula linking the colonial city of Merida to the beach resorts of the Mayan Riviera. As soon as next year, cruise ship passengers and sunburned college kids may be swilling cold beers in air-conditioned cars while the scenery zips by at 110 mph, stopping at archaeological sites and jungle lodges.
Far more ambitious will be a $4.5 billion high-speed line between Mexico City and Queretaro, the booming manufacturing and aerospace hub 120 miles northwest of the capital. Long-term plans would extend the route to Mexico’s second-largest city, Guadalajara, eventually filling sleek rail cars with business executives, tourists and families freed up from the country’s clogged highways.
Read the full report here at The Washington Post. Check out an accompanying graphic of the proposed rail revitalization efforts here.
(H/T: Travel Weekly)
