TEXAS - The name was always a problem.

Austin-San Antonio Intermunicipal Commuter Rail District. Try saying that fast three times. Or even once, slowly.

As of last month, the San Marcos-based government agency hoping someday soon to run passenger trains between Williamson County and San Antonio is now called the Lone Star Rail District. Agency officials have called a news conference for this morning to advertise that fact and that the train line will be called the LSTAR.

Or perhaps would be called. Because a dozen years after the Legislature authorized it, the train service is still mostly a line on a map. As agency board Chairman Sid Covington says, the main obstacles to creating a commuter line between Austin and San Antonio are now and always have been Union Pacific freights and money.

It's a matter of too much of the former and not enough of the latter.

The basics are this: The LSTAR would run on existing Union Pacific tracks that run through Austin, San Marcos, New Braunfels and San Antonio. The railroad at times has run more than two dozen freight trains a day on the line, along with a couple of Amtrak passenger runs a day. To make commuter rail viable, almost all of Union Pacific's freight runs (other than those for local customers like the quarries along the line) would have to be moved to new or refurbished tracks east of the existing tracks.

Rerouting the Union Pacific trains from Taylor , according to a 2008 Texas Department of Transportation study, would cost anywhere from almost $900 million - if the bypass extended only to south of San Marcos - to $2.4 billion to go to San Antonio's south side. The rail district last year was saying that construction of the line itself would take another $600 million .

So where would all this money come from? The district's "funding scenario" is that TxDOT and Union Pacific would split that elephantine cost of the alternative route for freight trains, with the railroad paying whatever the two sides ultimately decide equates to its financial benefit.