The Insane but Fun Way to Take a Train from Mexico City to Reno

Did you know you can enter an airport in the USA and end up in a different country without ever getting on a plane?

One of my favorite recent developments in North American travel is that the Tijuana airport is binational. Since 2015, the Cross Border Xpress, a pedestrian bridge, has let passengers walk directly into Tijuana International from the U.S. side. You check in for your flight in San Diego, cross the bridge, clear Mexican customs and airport security, and board. No port of entry, no hours-long vehicle queue. It works because the airport sits flush against the border.

And this isn’t even that exotic. San Diego’s Blue Line runs to within 600 feet of the border at San Ysidro. People cross on foot, hop on the trolley, and go to work, in both directions, every day. My own politics aside, I love how porous and symbiotic San Diego and Tijuana are.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the line, Mexico is building. President Claudia Sheinbaum picked up where AMLO’s Tren Maya left off and has kept the passenger rail program moving: new regional service around Mexico City, plus two long-distance routes radiating out from the capital that terminate in Nuevo Laredo and Nogales, two cities that sit directly on the U.S. border.

Two passenger rail lines with two portals knocking on our country’s door.

Let’s be clear up front: through-running trains between the U.S. and Mexico is not happening. Amtrak is not going to operate into Mexico the way it does into Canada, for geopolitical reasons that are what they are, warranted or not, I’m not interested in litigating that here.

1. Mexican and U.S. passenger trains never cross each other’s borders.

2. Customs happens at the border crossing itself: no pre-clearance.

3. It will take 15 hours to get from Nogales to Mexico City (run times are not posted from Mexican government, this is just a guess)

A few ideas and possibilities as I think of this exercise.

Given there’s two portals, let’s do the first one, Nogales, Mexico and for another post, we will do Nogales, Arizona.

Here’s my idea: At Nogales, the track is owned by Ferromex (a private rail consortium) on the Mexican side and Union Pacific on the Arizona side. There’s plenty of room on both sides for a passenger siding.

My proposal: build 700-foot platforms on each side of the border, connected by a single border control facility that physically straddles the line. A timed train arrives on one side; passengers alight, walk through the facility, clear passport control and customs, and board the connecting train waiting on the platform in the other country.

No train crosses the border. The building is the border crossing. The transfer is the port of entry.

Everything below is about what connects to that facility on the U.S. side.

The options below are color coded and explained by how likely they are to happen (should something happen at all).

Blue on above map

Pima County officials have already been talking to Mexican rail officials about Tucson–Nogales service in light of Mexico’s rail plan. As one Pima County Supervisor put it: “If they can do 700-plus miles of track, we’ve got to be able to figure out how to do 63 from the border up to the Tucson area.”

Sixty-three miles. That’s the whole ask for the minimum viable version of this.

This would be 115 minutes if you used the historical timetables of this route. (17 hours from Tucson to Mexico City)

Blue + red on above map

Phoenix–Tucson is currently being studied by the state with federal Corridor ID money (why this service doesn’t already exist is, frankly, insane), with 13 potential stations including Sky Harbor and Mesa Gateway airports.

But this is a politically loaded 158-mile project, it would take considerably longer to build, and in my opinion, the political capital statewide to build either Phoenix to Tucson or Tucson to Nogales are all that exist. Pick one, and the former makes far more sense.

This would be 260 minutes if you used the historical timetables of this route and the current planned time. (19.33 hours from Tucson to Mexico City)

Blue + red + green on above map

Continue from 1B, reactivate the 64 mile Wellton Branch, and you can run LA–Phoenix–Tucson–Nogales service. In a perfect world, LA–Phoenix would be high-speed rail, and 1B becomes the regional rail feeder connecting Phoenix to Nogales — and, through the straddle facility, to Mexico.

Do I need to explain why this is the hardest option? Not really.

Follow the FRA Southwest Plan. Connect Phoenix/Tucson to Nogales, and the border facility plugs into a network with high-speed rail to Los Angeles, high-speed service toward Reno and Las Vegas, and conventional service to Denver, Albuquerque, and Flagstaff.

Does it make perfect sense to build all of this? Yes. Was I born yesterday? No. But the ladder matters: each rung is independently useful, and the bottom rung is 63 miles of track to a facility Mexico is already building toward.

The world just watched an incredible World Cup shared among three countries, two of which are connected by two insanely slow Amtrak trains, and a third with no U.S. rail connection at all, now building two lines to the literal border from the second-largest metro on the continent.

Do I think many people will ride the train from Arizona, Nevada, or California to Mexico City? Very few. Do I think connecting Hermosillo, Ciudad Obregón, Los Mochis, and many others to our national network is a good idea? Absolutely yes.

Sometimes doing the most obvious thing is the hardest. ¡Sí se puede!

Nogales is the western portal. The eastern one, Nuevo Laredo, has its own set of options on the Texas side, from a San Antonio connection to leveraging the existing Texas Eagle. That’s a post going soon.