Nothing important to the United States until it actually gets cross-border integration – probably with some sort of enhanced B&O-style bus connectivity than with actually running trains or crews through, or doing some fancy consist shove or crew exchange ‘on the bridge’. I’d be impressed if we could get connectivity up to the Amtrak prospectively-improved line from San Antonio to DFW (or in a different context the prospective spur of TC from Houston across to San Antonio); I’d be even more impressed to see connectivity back up to St. Louis… but I don’t think anything like that is in the cards.
As noted, the train promises to be very important to Mexico in the range of regions and prospective destination pairs it will serve. The article mentions the utility to at least some Americans visiting the ‘maquiladora’ regions around Monterrey, although I can’t really predict how the devolving tariff kerfuffle will be affecting that.
I confess that I have heard some early horror stories about some of these new services, but with the right combination of amenities and demand development, I think most of what they’re doing should be sustainable. They certainly have more perceived demand for the rail passenger service than we do!
As I said, demand for a through service will likely change upward in a few years.
My Sister-In-Law is from Mexico and she said should would never ride a train in Mexico (safety concerns). There is a pretty good YouTube video on the guy that helped move equipment down there for the Maya train.
That was a source for some of the ‘horror stories’, including the Amfleet suspension concerns…
It would be cool if the former BR 225 trainset were used.
The only direct reference to electrification in this route is an airport connection, and I think the overall route length (1864km) probably makes some kind of sleeping accommodation desirable. They do mention ‘diesel and electric’ segments, though, so there could be some ex-Class-91 action in the future…
On the other hand, that ‘225’ is for km/h, not mph, and in British practice the trains were restricted to the same 125mph as the HSTs. I noted in the background of a couple of the videos that they seemed to have a LOT more HST sets than they said they were planning to operate…