March 30, 2026 - TRA Newswire -

A non-profit, service organization at the top side of North Texas has joined forces with city, business leaders and other organizations to let the state of Texas know that their daily Heartland Flyer train is important to the community and it serves an important need.

Located at the Texas-Oklahoma border on the Red River, citizens in Gainesville are rallying to keep their train depot a welcoming site with the daily Heartland Flyer stopping to drop off and pick up passengers on the train journey south to Fort Worth or north to Oklahoma City. 

Ripple Together, as the organization is known, "believes that healthy communities are the key to healthy growth…social and economic."

in 2025 Ripple Together became concerned about the fate of the Heartland Flyer, a partnered-service of the Texas and Oklahoma Department of Transportation, after the Texas Senate budget committee suddenly cut funding for the train.

TxDOT had been paying it's share of operating expenses for the past 20 years, pegged at around $3.5 million per year. That left Oklahoma to support the entire route and it put the train in jeopardy of being discontinued until the North Central Texas Council of Governments stepped in with emergency funding for one year. 

In a radio interview, Tavia Evans of Ripple Together, pointed out that it costs about $3.5 million to resurface just one mile of the two lanes on Interstate 35, the same as Texas contributes for its entire share of the train service. 

Evans said that the Heartland Flyer contributes over $23.7 million in economic activity yearly. "These are real dollars tied into our local economy." 

The Flyer, operating under a contract with Amtrak, carried over 80,000 passengers in 2025 and those riders would have been forced back onto Interstate 35 if the train was terminated. 

The Gainesville Amtrak station accounted for 7,032 passengers using the Heartland Flyer in 2025, that's about 40% of the entire city population of slightly over 17,000. 

The non-profit has initiated an online campaign and are asking residents, businesses and organizations who see the value of the corridor to sign the letter of support so there is a unified voice that can be sent to state legislators. 

"The Heartland Flyer is already working, this is not about starting something new", said Evans. "This is about maintaining infrastructure that is already delivering real value. We are positioning our region for long-term success and at the end of the day this isn't just about a train. It's about stewardship, it's about making infrastructure decisions that pay off for our taxpayers. This isn't about one budget cycle, it's about decades into the future."

The Ripple Together mission is to build bridges of change, one relationship at a time, that connect the people in the Community to one another through the organization of shared events, programs and services. 

Photo credit: Justin Mauldin