La Entrada al Pacífico: The Trade Corridor That Still Matters to the Trans-Pecos
If you've spent any time in the Trans-Pecos, you've probably heard the name before you ever saw a map of it: La Entrada al Pacífico, "the gateway to the Pacific." It's not a road that exists yet, not fully. It's a decades-old proposal for a trade corridor connecting the Mexican Pacific port of Topolobampo, in Sinaloa, through the state of Chihuahua, across the border at Presidio, and on through the Big Bend region toward the Permian Basin and the rest of Texas. It's been studied, debated, partly built, and partly stalled for close to thirty years now — and it still shapes how this part of the state thinks about its own future.
What the corridor actually is
La Entrada al Pacífico was formally designated Trade Corridor 56 under the federal Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act, with the concept taking shape in the late 1990s. The idea, championed largely by the Midland-Odessa Transportation Alliance (MOTRAN) working with economic development offices in the Mexican states of Chihuahua, Sinaloa, and Durango, was straightforward on paper: give West Texas and the Permian Basin a direct trade route to a Pacific port, cutting out the long haul around through existing border crossings farther south and east.
The route on the Mexican side runs from Topolobampo along Federal Highway 23, through the city of Chihuahua, to the border crossing at Ojinaga, across from Presidio, Texas. From there, the U.S. side follows U.S. 67 to Interstate 10, picks up U.S. 385 toward Odessa, and continues on I-20 to Lamesa, where the route splits toward Amarillo, Fort Worth-Dallas, or Wichita Falls depending on the final destination. A rail component already exists for part of the route: the Ferrocarril Chihuahua al Pacífico, a line completed in 1961 as the successor to the old Kansas City, Mexico and Orient Railway, which threads through Chihuahua's Copper Canyon — genuinely one of the more dramatic stretches of railroad engineering on the continent — before reaching the coast.
That rail line, worth knowing on its own merits, is proof that a version of this corridor's promise already exists and already works. Today it runs passenger service under the name El Chepe, one of the most celebrated rail journeys in North America — 37 bridges and 86 tunnels across roughly 400 miles, climbing to nearly 8,000 feet near the Divisadero overlook before dropping back down toward the Pacific. It's operated today by Ferromex, Mexico's largest private railroad, and draws travelers from well outside the region specifically to ride it. That's worth sitting with: the corridor's rail backbone isn't a hypothetical. It's a working railroad that's been moving freight and passengers through some of the roughest terrain on the continent since 1961. What's unfinished isn't the concept — it's the highway and border-crossing infrastructure needed to connect that working rail line efficiently to the Permian Basin on the U.S. side.
Why it mattered enough to be news here
This is where the story becomes a local one. The corridor's U.S. leg runs close to or through the towns of the Big Bend and Trans-Pecos — Presidio, Marfa, Alpine, and the wider stretch of Terrell, Brewster, and Presidio counties that this paper has always covered. When TxDOT held hearings on the corridor's development in the mid-2000s, it wasn't an abstract policy question for the people who showed up. It was a question about what kind of highway traffic would be running past their front doors.
The concerns were practical and specific: a significantly wider highway carrying international freight truck traffic through small, quiet border towns; the effect on a regional economy that, in places like Marfa and the Big Bend, leans heavily on tourism and the area's remoteness as an asset rather than a liability. Marfa's mayor at the time, Dave Lanman, was among the local voices pushing back, and TxDOT went looking at alternative routing around the more sensitive stretches as a result. On the other side of the argument, Midland-Odessa's business community — and the government of Chihuahua — saw a real opportunity: a shorter, faster path to a Pacific port for a region whose economy has always been tied to how efficiently it can move oil, gas, and goods to market.
Where it stands now
Decades on, La Entrada al Pacífico hasn't been abandoned, but it also hasn't been finished. It remains a state- and federally-designated trade corridor, and MOTRAN — which has kept the project alive longer than almost anyone else — points to real, if partial, progress: expanded natural gas pipeline capacity along parts of the route, tied to Permian Basin gas finding new markets in Mexico as that country's power generation shifts away from coal. Sections of Mexican Federal Highway 23 remain incomplete decades after they were first projected to be finished. A rail bridge at the Presidio-Ojinaga crossing, damaged by fire in 2008, has needed rebuilding. What exists today is less a finished corridor than a long-running, slow-moving infrastructure project that periodically resurfaces in the news, gets a round of renewed attention, and then settles back into the same unhurried pace it's kept since the 1990s.
That's not a failure, exactly. It's closer to how most big regional infrastructure actually gets built in a place like the Trans-Pecos, where distances are enormous, populations are small, and the tax base to force anything to move quickly simply isn't there. The corridor persists because the underlying logic — a legitimate, shorter trade route between a major Mexican industrial state and the Permian Basin — never stopped making sense, even while the actual concrete and rail ties have gone in at a fraction of the pace anyone originally hoped for.
What this means if you live here
You don't have to have an opinion on international trade policy to get something useful out of this story. La Entrada al Pacífico is a case study in a pattern that plays out constantly in small, remote places: an outside proposal shows up promising to transform the local economy, the people who actually live there have to weigh a real, specific cost (traffic, character of place, environmental impact) against a real, uncertain benefit (jobs, trade, growth), and then everyone has to live with a debate that doesn't resolve on anyone's preferred timeline.
The corridor's slow crawl also says something honest about how regional identity gets protected. Marfa and the Big Bend towns didn't stop the project outright — they didn't have the leverage to, and much of the corridor's logic was sound. What they did was force a conversation, get alternative routing considered, and make sure the project's backers couldn't simply assume nobody would push back. That's a small, unglamorous kind of grit, but it's a real one: showing up to a TxDOT hearing in a town of a few hundred people, saying plainly what you stand to lose, and trusting that a fair process will at least have to account for it — even if it takes another twenty years to see how the story ends.
One practical takeaway: big infrastructure promises move on a much longer timeline than the people affected by them ever get told up front. If a proposal like this touches your town, don't wait for the "final" version before you speak up — the version on the table when it's first announced is rarely the version that eventually gets built, and the towns that shape it are the ones that showed up early and stayed in the conversation, not the ones that assumed someone else would.
For more on how the people of Terrell County have weighed in on the region's future, see our piece on Sanderson's "Cactus Capital of Texas" nickname and the community coverage from Marathon News Leader. Browse more stories in Grit & Character.