Puebla Got Left Off the Train. Sheinbaum's Passenger Rail Promise Ends at Its Border.

A passenger rail line connecting Mexico City to Veracruz through Puebla sat at number 73 on Claudia Sheinbaum's list of 100 campaign promises. The promise lasted through Election Day. It did not survive the first year of her presidency. Puebla, a metropolitan area of 3.2 million with no passenger rail service to the capital, got dropped from the plan without a public announcement, without a press release, without a single word of explanation from the federal rail agency that was supposed to build it.

The Programa Institucional de la Agencia Reguladora del Transporte Ferroviario dropped any mention of the Mexico City-Veracruz passenger service from its planning horizon. Puebla was left off a project that residents and business groups in the state counted on. It is now the largest metropolitan area in central Mexico without direct passenger rail service to the capital, a gap that successive Mexican administrations have promised to close for two decades without delivering. Puebla is now the largest metropolitan area in central Mexico without direct passenger rail service to the capital, a gap that successive Mexican administrations have promised and failed to close for two decades.

Sheinbaum's campaign promise carried the weight of political specifics. Her 100 compromisos explicitly listed passenger train service between Mexico City and Veracruz with a Puebla stop. The framing was part of a broader push by the Sheinbaum campaign to revive Mexico's passenger rail network, which was dismantled in the 1990s when Ferrocarriles Nacionales was privatized and freight concessions replaced long-distance routes. What remained in 2024 were a few tourist trains and the Maya Train project in the southeast, itself criticized for cost overruns and route disputes.

The Puebla gap was and remains glaring. The city of roughly 1.5 million anchors a metro area of 3.2 million that sends tens of thousands of daily commuters and business travelers to Mexico City via Highway 150D, a six-lane toll road that runs congested from dawn to well past dark. A passenger rail connection could cover the 130 kilometers in roughly ninety minutes, but it never materialized. Commuters have been riding buses on Highway 150D since the last interurban rail services ended in the 1990s.

What killed the Mexico City-Veracruz line was never publicly stated in unequivocal terms, but three overlapping problems point to the answer. Freight operators control the rail corridor and would need to cede track space, bringing compensation disputes over existing infrastructure. The 130-kilometer stretch through the Sierra Madre Oriental foothills requires significant investment in tunnels, bridges, grade separation, and landslide protection in a region where the terrain and climate chew through infrastructure. And the federal government has not committed any funding in its budget to construction of the passenger line, making the commitment effectively unfunded wishful planning.

Puebla's business groups and local politicians have pushed state and federal officials for years to restore passenger rail service. Their argument is straightforward: the city's economic growth depends on smoother links to Mexico City, and trucks alone cannot move people at the pace a modern metropolitan economy demands. The response has been silence in planning documents and the erasure of what used to be a listed commitment.

Mexico's rail revival has not stopped entirely. The Maya Train continues operating in the southeast, and the Interoceanic Corridor connecting the Pacific and Gulf through Oaxaca and Veracruz has moved freight since 2024. But those projects share a military-managed structure that the national rail agency does not oversee in the same way, and neither includes a passenger option that would serve a Puebla commutershed on the scale the city needs.

Puebla's train was a campaign promise, a campaign talking point, and now a blank space in a federal planning document. The capital still has its trains. The southeast still has its tourist railroad. Puebla still has Highway 150D, the toll road that replaced passenger rail in the 1990s and has been overcrowded with commuters traveling between Puebla and Mexico City ever since. Business groups in Puebla estimate the lack of rail connectivity costs the state millions of dollars annually in lost productivity due to traffic congestion on the highway, though those numbers are disputed by federal transport officials. The state government has floated the idea of its own commuter rail project connecting Puebla to Mexico City through San Martín Texmelucan, a roughly 130-kilometer corridor, but securing federal approval and funding for that proposal has not advanced beyond preliminary conversations. The commuters remain stationary in traffic while the campaign promises move backwards.