Three days per week, the train joins the Sunset Limited in San Antonio and continues to Los Angeles via El Paso and Tucson.

The Eagle began on October 2, 1981, as a restructuring of the Inter-American, which had operated a daily schedule from Chicago to Laredo, Texas, via San Antonio since 1973.

[4][5][6][7] On November 15, 1988, Amtrak revived a Houston section, this time diverging at Dallas and running over the route of the Southern Pacific's Sunbeam.

Amtrak had intended to operate the Lone Star over this route back in the 1970s, but dropped the plan in the face of obstruction from the Southern Pacific.

[13] As part of Amtrak's response to the COVID-19 pandemic resulting in greatly depressed ridership, service was reduced to tri-weekly throughout the corridor October 11, 2020.

[15] However, the train began operating on a five days per week schedule in January 2022 due to a resurgence of the virus caused by the Omicron variant and remained so until March 2022.

[15][16] In the August 2009 issue of Trains, Brian Rosenwald, Amtrak's chief of product management, noted that the Sunset Limited might be replaced by an extension of the Texas Eagle to Los Angeles: "We projected the revenue and looked at the logistics, and with a little bit of rescheduling came to the conclusion that we can make this happen with the equipment we have, and the additional revenue the train earns will more than cover the increased operating costs".

In Arkansas, the train stops in Walnut Ridge, the state capital of Little Rock, and the stations at Malvern, Arkadelphia, Hope, and Texarkana, on the Arkansas–Texas border.

A sleeping car and a coach (designated internally as train 421) are conveyed to the Sunset Limited on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays, departing San Antonio at 2:45 am.