California high-speed rail is good, is well under construction, is likely to survive federal grant loss, and could be improved with a conventional-speed interim extension. (Alan Fisher)
Los Angeles has big rail and BRT expansion plans. (Nick Andert (nandert) via RMTransit)
In June we covered the LAX metro station and the K line in Los Angeles.
This is an open thread.
I think the smart move would be to realize the California high speed rail project is a complete turd and move on. Does anybody really believe that if this project was put to Statewide vote, it wouldn’t be killed off? At what point do reasonable people decide to quit arguing about the routes of unbuilt transit projects that will never be finished before they’re dead, if they’re ever finished at all?
Just let it go.
Here’s a good explanation about why big projects (especially transit projects) fail.
In the case of at least one of the San Diego light rail lines, as well as one in Portland, no federal funds were sought as it was obvious FTA grants would significantly increase the costs of the projects.
Here’s two examples:
• Current blanket project specifications used on these things require no foreign flagged vessels be used. This makes it virtually impossible to obtain any foreign made components, as there just aren’t that many US flagged container ships operating.
Try building a home today with that same requirement: buy a lamp fixture made in China? It must be brought over on a US flagged ship. So, so trip to the hardware store for you! Same with every single nail used.
• The unreliable nature of US only production facilities make them expensive. Eg: the 10 trains for Brightline West are being built in an entirely new plant in New York. There’s no guarantee they’ll ever have any more orders. If they don’t, it’s a pretty high cost per train set.
The CAHSR project has already achieved operational success in one segment: The Caltrain corridor between San Francisco and San Jose. The extra funds (I believe it was about 1/3rd of the total) helped to finally fund the electrification, enabling faster and more frequent trains that attract thousands more riders each day. Critics don’t ever credit this to CAHSR — preferring to cast the entire project as wasteful.
What they did in Peninsula corridor was indeed a smart move that make way for future high speed rail but still gains short-term benefit.
I can understand that in the middle of SF to LA, there is no such opportunity, but a little bit disappointed that Los Angeles didn’t pull something like that. In fact that SoCal segments were among the last to be environmentally cleared.
@Al S.
To invert the common phrase, this is a bug, not a feature. The Caltrain electrification and signalling project cost ~$30M per km, Alon Levy at Pedestrian Observations has shown that both combined should be $6-8M per km, a 4x-5x overrun. If the CAHSR money help fund/coverup the waste, then it wasn’t to California’s benefit.
Additionally, the electrification is not a “CAHSR” success, even if CAHSR funds were used in part. The tracks are not high speed. The project was managed by Caltrain fully independent of CAHSR, and there is nothing CAHSR is doing with actual high speed track that interfaces with Caltrain electrification. Caltrain could have (should have!) electrified two decades ago when they took control of the corridor, instead of pursuing the diesel “Baby Bullet” plan. Once again, if part of the reason the electrification took so long was because they were “waiting for HSR money” then CAHSR’s involvement was a net negative, and shouldn’t be claimed as a success.
To me, the big mistake in hindsight was to build across the southern Central Valley first (Merced to Bakersfield). The thought at the time was that the long section would be easiest and quickest to build across— and that hasn’t proven to be the case (mainly due to needing new right-of-way).
Had the project been to build the tracks between Bakersfield and Los Angeles first, the new tunnel between Palmdale and Burbank would have made a quicker, profound change to traveling through the state. The San Joaquins already connect from Bakersfield through the Central Valley and into the Bay Area.
But you would still have the gap between Bakersfield and Palmdale and people would still be criticizing it. No way your gonna run electrics after Palmdale, Metro is all diesel.
Al S.
Well, connecting San Francisco and San Jose by better rail was a smart move. The rest of CAHSR was (and still is) complete folly. There was 30 miles of tunnel planned between Palmdale and the Burbank airport right? That’s 100% bullshit right there nobody should have ever believed. 30 miles of tunnel is just crazy…
The reason the powers-that-be wanted to build rail across the Central Valley is they thought it would easy. That way when the trains got to Palmdale nobody could question the high cost of the tunnels. But now the “estimated” price tag is what? Over 100 billion? I guess the second worst part of it is all the construction sites spread around the Central Valley that people drive by building a track for a train they’ll never ride. The worst part is “internet railheads” still going on and on about changes in the route like nothing is wrong…. Jesus! it’s over! The damn thing is never going to be built.
Way too many transit supports end up looking like Bagdad Bob supporting rail projects that won’t, or shouldn’t, happen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ung95ORVUY
“The reason the powers-that-be wanted to build rail across the Central Valley is they thought it would easy.”
The purpose of an HSR line is to solve a mobility need, not to be an easy project. I can’t believe the powers that be have absolutely no interest in residents’ and visitors’ mobility; they just see it as an abstract construction project. They have constituents who need something like this, so that they don’t have to resort to flying, driving, or a bus on freeways.
A sensible tactic would be to connect Bakersfield with San Francisco via newly-electrified Calitrain track that was part of the project, and I believe the San Francisco terminal is already built as part of the SF central subway project. So why not connect them end-to-end even if the last 60 miles isn’t high speed? Sacramento would be no worse off than it is under the current plan terminating at Merced. Has the commission considered this? If not, why not?
@Al S.
Here you are EXACTLY right! Believe it or not, more people travel to the the Los Angeles metro area (LA county) from Bakersfield (Kern county) than from the whole SF Bay Area combined! Granted, because of how metro areas are defined by arbitrary counties, a lot of this is short distance that happen to cross a county line (Mojave to Palmdale) and not relevant to HSR. Yet New Haven to NYC gets large traffic at similar distance from a similar sized metro area, and Bakersfield is the 22nd busiest Amtrak station in the country because of how many people get off the train to catch a bus to LA or vice versa. The lack of a rail connection between Southern CA and the Central Valley is THE key missing transit link for California, and should have been addressed first, leading to immediate benefit and momentum for the rest of the project.
Only quibble, the route should go over Tejon pass, direct from Bakersfield to Santa Clarita, not detour for dozens of km over Tehachapi pass and through Palmdale, making the trip longer and more expensive for millions to serve only a small population.
@tourist, Al. S. was referring to the complete link between Bakersfield and LA at the start, the tunnel between Palmdale and Burbank is just a part of that. There would be some tunnels over the Tehachapi pass as well.
“Only quibble, the route should go over Tejon pass, direct from Bakersfield to Santa Clarita, not detour for dozens of km over Tehachapi pass and through Palmdale, making the trip longer and more expensive for millions to serve only a small population.”
That’s the detour I heard about. What’s the travel-time penalty?
@ tourist:
The tunneling between Palmdale and Burbank is just a portion of the planned Bakersfield to Los Angeles segment as Onux mentioned.
@ Onux:
Serving the Antelope Valley (Palmdale/ Lancaster) area is something valid to do. It has population of 444K. The location provides access to the east too, hopefully providing connectivity between Las Vegas and Victorville with Central and Northern California. It also cuts the needed tunneling distance in half compared to a Tejon Pass tunnel.
@Mike Orr
You cannot “connect Bakersfield with San Francisco via newly-electrified Calitrain track” because there is no direct way to get from the under-construction CAHSR route (which around Merced) and the Caltrain route on the SF Peninsula. There are tracks used by the current Amtrak San Joaquins, but they lead to Oakland, right across the bay from SF, and to get to the Caltrain tracks in San Jose would mean going south, after going north to Stockton, only to go north again on Caltrain tracks after reaching San Jose. This S-shaped route wouldn’t be 60 miles of non-HSR track, but closer to 260 miles. It would be totally uncompetitive, just getting off the train in Oakland and walking to BART to get to San Francisco would be much faster. And even this route would involve diesel locomotives in the middle, because the track currently used by the San Joaquins is not electrified.
Also, the San Francisco Terminal (Transbay Terminal, branded as Salesforce Terminal) is not already built. The building is built, along with an underground station box, but there are no train tracks present, and not tunnel built to take trains from the current end of line to the downtown terminal.
It also was not built as part of the Central Subway project. The two were underway at the same time, but are separate.
The HSR is supposed to ultimately go in a Y with branches to both Sacramento and San Francisco. So where would the San Francisco branch diverge from if not at Merced? Fresno?
The Chowchilla Wye:
https://hsr.ca.gov/high-speed-rail-in-california/project-sections/merced-to-fresno/merced-to-fresno-central-valley-wye/
It’s actually south of Merced. So trains will turn north into Merced and head out going the other way. That is except for runs that don’t stop in Merced.
@Onux if that’s the case then they would be a lot more broke and in a bigger pickle than they are now and still not have electric service.
At least now they’ll have electrics running within a decade and
a place they can test trains at speeds greater than 220mph.
They’ll also have connections in place for ACE in Merced with
connections to Brightline over the HDC and Metro in Palmdale next
up and all electric.
The Valley might not have went smoothly but that was do to management (or mismanagement by Morales) more than it had to do with location.
@Mike Orr
As @Al S. noted, the connection to the Bay Area is meant to go from a “Y” around Madera, though the Pacheco Pass, then up to San Jose to meet Caltrain. That however is ~183km of new construction, compared to 221km being built now, and involves a major tunnel underneath the coast range at Pacheco Pass. In other words it is more work than has been done to date (the IOS in the central valley so far is just earthworks and overpasses, no track or overhead wire!). It is not something that can just be done to make the existing segment more useful.
@tourist
How would have addressing the southern crossing first have left them more broke? The CAHSR route to Burbank is (probably) 188km. Going direct over Tejon would be ~163km. Including the Madera extension CAHSR is planning on building 276km in the Valley first go. The mountain crossing is more expensive per km, but CAHSR is redesigning right now to allow higher maximum grades of 3.5% (possible with HSR trains because they have great power-to-weight) which will dramatically reduce earthwork cost and tunnel length (they should have done this from the start). Trading 113km of flat track for about half that distance of mountain track is a bargain given the benefits.
As it is, in a decade they will NOT have a connection to MetroLink in Palmdale, because that requires building a southern crossing over Tehachapi Pass, which they are not doing (but is EXACTLY what I am arguing they should have done first!) Connecting from ACE to a HSR train in Merced, only to get off it again in Bakersfield and get on a bus will not attract riders or make HSR look good. Connecting from ACE to a HSR train that takes you directly to LA would be a game changer, even if the first part of the trip was on legacy freight track and pulled by a diesel locomotive using the same route and schedule as the San Joaquins to Bakersfield today (the French did this with some of their HSR extensions, pulling trains by locos from the end of the new route to the final destination until the rest of the line was built.)
From what I understand the High speed rail offered 4 different options to start. The Feds @ the time said it had to be started in the most economical depressed area to qualify for federal funds. Also I think the original bond issue said that the train must include eastern valley cities, unlike I-5.
@Onux
I wasn’t talking Tejon, that was nixed long ago. Items of prop1a would not have been met. For starters, the slower speeds down into the Canyons and urban areas such as Santa Clarita doomed the 2:40 time requirement.
But regardless, special interest were never going to allow it.
I thought we were discussing Burbank vs the Central Valley as a starting point right (I’ll discuss Tehachapi Pass in a minute)? The Burbank tunneling from Palmdale to Burbank would have been much more expensive than the Valley in yesteryear dollars. And like I said, worthless for the most part with Metro already providing service (remember not able to open up electric in Gabriels). You got a major tunneling that would have had some of the same law suits in addition to others, enviro clearence issues, incompetent management, fed requirements and interference and etc. And for what, a system that couldn’t open up to 220+. And where was the power, maintenance facilities and staging areas to be? There was plenty of cheap and open space for CV planning.
Now what do you get for the CV option:
With the 171 miles from Merced to Bakersfield you got a stable ridership transferring from the San Jouqins running at 200 plus speeds, and you got the new ACE connection in Merced which gives a great ridership base to begin with.
Now lets add Tehachapi Pass to the CV (same price as adding it to Burbank) and now you got Metro added at Palmdale, Brightline at Palmdale (with vast potential for private money). And you also now have city pairs of Fresno-Las Vegas, Bakersfield-LV, Bakersfield-Rancho Cucamunga, in addition to your Metro and ACE connections. (Note: HDC has been granted clearance
for design and construction)
@Mike Orr
The distance penalty of going via Tehachapi is ~25km with a Burbank tunnel (more on that below) or ~72km via the ‘normal’ route via Santa Clarita. This represents ~7 to 17 min of travel time longer than Tejon, depending on assumptions (there is great variability on average speed through mountain passes depending on how much you spend to build; steep slopes have lower speed than flats because of the need to climb or brake, but tunnels have lower speed than moderate slopes because of air pressure issues).
@Al S.
Serving the Antelope Valley is not at all valid, for several reasons
First, the Antelope Valley is the high Mojave Desert, those 444k people are spread over a large, empty area. The actual catchment is the 359k people in the Palmdale/Lancaster urban area. In comparison, the urban areas designed to be served by CAHSR (S. Diego, LA, Sac, SF, etc.) total to 31+MILLION people. We are talking almost two orders of magnitude difference! You can’t let the tail wag the dog and make the trip 5-10% longer for tens of millions of riders so 360k people get a stop.
For that matter there are 1.1M million people in the far East Bay (Concord/Antioch/Livermore), plus another million or so in the near East Bay (Oakland, Berkeley, etc.) who don’t get a stop. If those 1-2M people can be expected to drive or take BART 30-45mi to get to SF or San Jose, then the 360k in Palmdale can drive or ride Metrolink 50mi to do the same in Burbank or LA.
Second, there will be no connection to Las Vegas in Palmdale. Brightline West has chosen a route south through Cajon Pass to San Bernadino and then Rancho Cucamonga toward LA, not a route west to Palmdale for their station (this is the right choice, as it makes the trip from Southern California to Vegas much shorter). Victorville is only ~350k, it is not a factor.
Third, it will not result in less tunneling. That was the original justification, since Tehachapi is ~35km straight line (roughly Arvin to Mojave) while Tejon is 55km (Lebec to Santa Clarita). However, to try and meet a 2 hour 40 min SF-LA time*, CAHSR is now planning a route direct from Palmdale to Burbank with a whopping 45-50km of tunnel, to shorten the route versus following I-5 and CA-14 (current Metrolink Path). The Palmdale route is now TWO mountain crossings (the Tehachapis from Bakersfield to Palmdale, and the San Gabriel’s from Palmdale to Burbank) which total to more mountains than Tejon Pass. And the San Gabriel crossing has no mountain pass, so it is the most difficult kind, tunnel almost the whole way, with attendant costs (i.e. my comment above about reducing tunnels with a steeper grade won’t help in the San Gabriels).
The direct Burbank route brings us back to population. There are 1.8M people in the San Fernando Valley, and another 275k in Santa Clarita. Right now they have a single stop in Burbank. With a Tejon route the line would follow I-5 and you could have another stop in the northern S. Fernando or Santa Clarita for those 2.1M people. For comparison, Burbank to Santa Clarita is ~30km, while CAHSR is planning stops ~15km apart between San Francisco and SFO for a pop of 1.5M in SF and San Mateo Counties. Even the simple act of replacing Palmdale with Santa Clarita means you are only “losing” 85k population via Tejon.
If you REALLY think Palmdale is that important, there are a few options. You can improve the existing MetroLink line (electrify, medium speed upgrades, better frequency) to minimize the the trip to Burbank. Santa Clarita is only 37 mi to Palmdale, so a station there would mean Palmdale is closer to CAHSR at the start than Riverside or Irvine(!!!).
Finally (and almost unbelievably!) the Antelope Valley stretches west from Palmdale almost to Tejon pass. Look at CA Route 138 on a map. One could build the Tejon Pass route, then put in a branch to Palmdale, almost all of it totally flat, less than 10km through hills (not even mountains, no tunneling!). From there an electrified MetroLink line could take trains to Santa Clarita and rejoin the path to LA. No one would ride this line because of how long it would take (more distance, not high speed) and because there is almost no market for travel from Northern California to Palmdale, so fares would have to be very low. Depending on your perspective, this is good for marketing (get people to the website with “$20 to LA!”, then they pick a convenient $45 ticket over the once-a-day Palmdale special) or for equity (a $20 ticket is huge for some even if it takes longer). Building Tejon, along with a Palmdale branch and the MetroLink upgrades to Santa Clarita would probably still be cheaper than what CAHSR is planning with the Burbank mega-tunnel.
There is NO justification for the Tehachapi Pass/Palmdale route for CAHSR.
*2 hour 40 minute is a legal requirement of the bond measure, but CAHSR has published route lengths and travel times for every segment but one, and to get to 2h40m that segment would need to travel at ~354 kph when max speed is 350kph, so . . . .
@ Onux:
You make some valid points. I’ll also mention that Santa Clarita has half the population of the Antelope Valley so a Santa Clarita Station could have also made sense.
A few decades ago, there was also a debate between using Altamont versus Pacheco Pass. Pacheco won out because San Jose wanted to be “on the way” rather than be on a spur or stub. Ironically, now the plan has a Merced stub rather than a San Jose stub — so it’s not necessarily more “on the way” at the end of the day. An Altamont Pass scenario could have offered so many other benefits to California by enabling other rail connections — especially now that the Pacheco Pass issues and costs are better known.
CAHSR did study a Tejon Pass alignment in 2005 as far as I can tell. I can’t seem to find a discussion about the cost estimates from that. However given how badly off the cost estimates were I’m not sure if that’s a valid comparison any more anyway. Finally, there wasn’t any “middle” tunnel alignment corridor studied in between the Tejon and Tehachapi + Soledad passes.
So we will apparently never know if either pass strategy would have been better or not. It’s been 20 years since the 2005 study and revisiting these things seems pretty awkward now.
@tourist
Tejon was nixed because of “special interests” but it is so much worse than that. A major LA politician named Michael Antonovich got Palmdale written into Prop 1A because . . . he is from Palmdale and wanted his hometown to be “important” like LA and SF. Pure political pork, with no transportation justification at all, only negatives for California.
Tejon would be BETTER for 2:40 than Tehachapi, because it is SHORTER, and shorter distances take less time to travel. The speed restrictions in the pass or through the San Fernando are not an issue, Palmdale faces the same restrictions just in different places (Tehachapi and tunnel vs Tejon and San Fernando.)
The question isn’t the central valley vs Burbank-to-Palmdale-alone, the question is central valley vs Burbank-to-Bakersfield-complete (or with Tejon, really just Bakersfield to Santa Clarita/Newhall). If you make the southern crossing you can run trains direct from LA to Sacramento/Oakland/Fresno/Bakersfield TODAY, right away, using the same tracks and schedule as the San Joaquins, by hooking the trains to diesel engines in Bakersfield (assuming electrification-only of the route from LA to Burbank as part of the first route). This would be enormous for California, passengers really favor one seat rides, and it makes the slowest part of the journey (transferring to a bus in Bakersfield, then I-5 traffic) the fastest so would show huge trip time improvement (the San Joaquins already average freeway speed of ~55mph through the valley).
Per your plan people are looking at a three seat ride (San Joaquin to Merced, then CAHSR to Bakersfield, then a bus(!) to LA, or years later, a train from Palmdale to LA that takes 2 hrs(!). People won’t ride that, too difficult, too slow. “Stable ridership”? “Great ridership base”? The San Joaquins and ACE see less than 3,000 riders per day each, ACE only on weekdays. Some 200k people travel from NorCal to SoCal daily, and they won’t be rushing to jump on a train they already don’t ride for the chance at a slower journey with two transfers. Building all of the CV portion and then the Bakersfield to Palmdale path through the Tehachapis to join Metrolink would definitely be more expensive than just the mountain crossing (and still slower than taking a bus from Bakersfield, depending on traffic!), all the more so compared to Tejon.
How can I more firmly emphasize that just 120km of track (~50km flat across the southern valley, 55km from the Grapevine to Castaic, then 15km flat again to the Metrolink track at Newhall) would completely revolutionize travel in California, and provide immediate tangible benefits and an actual growing ridership base to leverage for future expansion. That is what should have been (had to have been) done first. Instead CA will open up to 275km of track in the Valley and the people who don’t attack it as a train to nowhere will yawn, because it will do nothing to improve their transportation options without a southern crossing.
There will be no connection to Brightline in Palmdale, and no Bakersfield/Fresno to Vegas/Rancho Cucamonga traffic with a Tehachapi crossing because Brightline is NOT GOING to Palmdale, it is going to Rancho Cucamonga, which is 75km away from Palmdale, on the other side of the San Gabriel Mountains, at a station on MetroLink’s San Bernadino line, not on the Antelope Valley line. The High Desert Corridor from Palmdale to Victorville does not have any approvals, what has been approved and under construction is Brightline West’s path along I-15 from Victorville to Vegas, across a different part of the high desert. San Bernadino County has withdrawn from the Joint Powers Authority for the Palmdale-Victorville HDC, so it is dead, a dream that will never happen.
Northern California to Vegas via HSR itself is a foolish dream. Vegas is almost as far north as Fresno. Expecting the 3.2M annual visitors from NorCal to Vegas to go several hundred km out of their way by travelling south to Palmdale only turn and go back north is foolish. They will take plane due east instead. What you need to do is optimize the route for the 74M annual travelers from NorCal to SoCal, a market ~22 times larger, and one where the train can compete, with a trip some 2 hours shorter.
@Al S.
Altamont is also a better choice than Pacheco, although not quite as decisively as Tejon. Depending on your assumptions/objectives there are situations where Pacheco is better (although not as CAHSR is planning the rest of the network). You are correct that it was politics that got the better option dropped. There is hope, however. Unlike Palmdale, Prop 1A does not require service to Gilroy as the only option. The Altamont Corridor is allowed and specified in Prop 1A as well. We will see if time and budget constraints bring California to the superior choice.
The Merced “stub” is different than what the San Jose stub would have been. The Merced path is just the first part of the path to Sacramento, not a long term end in itself as would be for San Jose with Altamont.
CAHSR’s study in 2005 was never completed because Palmdale threatened a lawsuit because Prop 1A requires the Bakersfield to LA segment to go through Palmdale. CAHSR’s study was technically illegal because of the the terrible language put into Prop 1A by Michael Antonovich as his pet project. California may pay for that dealmaking for generations. Truly a “Democracy is the worst form of government except for the others” moment. The project is so far behind and so beyond budget that there is a slim chance it will have to go to the ballot again in a decade or more, and with different power brokers in the state the Palmdale error will be corrected before it is built – the cost of the Burbank mega-tunnel alone could drive an effort to change the law in this regard.
We absolutely know which would have been and what still would be the better pass option: Tejon. The facts of geography and demography only provide one answer. Go to Google maps and draw a line from LA to San Francisco, see which pass it crosses and which direction it is pointing. Then draw a line from Burbank to Palmdale and see which direction it is pointing. The answer becomes painfully clear.
@Onux
I can’t sit and belabor the points to death with you but I do find you wrong on many of them and I’ll have to leave it as a agree (I assume) to disagree moment.
I could spend the evening cut and pasting major docs and links into the discussion but not worth the effort. A lot of it we will see it when it happens.
Nighty night.
The Palmdale card that could be played but isn’t is with their airport. It has ample room to grow. It could offload lots of air travel — if only a terminal was connected to high speed rail!
Making Palmdale Airport popular by colocating the station with high speed rail would add thousands of riders to CAHSR. Shorter airport trains could run into the LA Basin like a shuttle service.
Unfortunately, the Palmdale HSR station is planned to be 2 miles away. The Air Force (which has a plant there) and LAWA don’t see a future in that airport.
This gets into how the US and even California does a terrible job encouraging easy transferring between airport terminals and great rail services. We could have integrated intercity networks like Frankfurt or Copenhagen — but our national airport strategies never dovetails with urban or intercity rail planning.
Brightline Florida did put the Orlando Station at the airport and many riders come from people landing there. CAHSR has planned stations next to SFO and BUR. There have long been discussions of a SJC to Diridon rail shuttle too. So it’s thought about. It’s just never packaged into a coherent national strategy.
@Onyx, you state:
with which I would have no objection if it were that simple. However, it is not. The Tejon route is simply too steep on the north face to attack it from the SR99/I-5 direction. The plan was to head southeast from Bakersfield to the north face of the mountains about where the Tehachapis sprout from the San Emigdios, then diagonal up the face of the mountains so that the tracks would cross I-5 right around the crest of the Grapevine. From there the trackway would turn south and enter the tunnel to pass under the top fifteen hundred feet of the mountains, emerging
The Tehachapi route is much like the Tejon route in its western approach, just thirty miles to the north. According to Wikipedia:
A “base tunnel” in this section would make no sense, because the elevation at Mojave is 2,200 feet higher than at Bakersfield and 1,400 feet above Caliente. The summit of the UP railroad is 3,771 which is 1,500 feet above Mojave. In fact, the line is expected to travel west of Mojave in order to lengthen the downgrade from the summit by using a shelf on the mountains southwest of Mojave. The summit tunnel, as mentioned above, would be only seven miles long. The western approach begins its climb west of Caliente and uses the long east-west ridge to the north to gain another thousand feet above Caliente before actually entering the pass.
The huge earth moving machinery that modern road builders use to push freeways through chaotic mountains like the Tehachapis are equally useful for railroad builders. They were not available to the SP back in the 1880’s when it was reaching for Los Angeles, but they are today. HSR will use them.
@Al S.
Palmdale Regional Airport doesn’t really have room to grow. It shares its runways with Plant 42, which is a US Air Force owned facility operated by Lockheed where the B-2 bomber was built and where the B-21 bomber will be (among many other top secret projects). Plant 42 is a key piece of national security infrastructure. While the Air Force did sell the commuter terminal area a while back, it is unlikely they would allow it to be developed into a major airport if the space or runway usage could affect Plant 42.
LAWA (Los Angeles World Airports) no longer owns Palmdale Regional. They sold it to the city of Palmdale in 2013. The idea of a “Palmdale Intercontinental” to relieve LAX was never going to happen and there were no commercial airline service to anywhere at the time (or since).
Palmdale Regional is some 65km from downtown LA. For comparison Denver’s way-out-there airport is just under 30km from downtown. Ontario airport is only about 60km from downtown LA, and it is surrounded by a semi-independent metro area of 4.6M people. Palmdale is surrounded by a few hundred thousand people and thousands of square miles of empty desert.
@Tom Terrific
I’m not sure the point you are trying to make. Yes, pushing HSR over either Tejon or Tehachapi pass will be a major undertaking. In fact, either would be close to the highest HSR mountain crossing anywhere (Spain crosses higher passes at lower elevation via tunnels, but even the Pajares Base tunnel has a lower elevation, and the Guadarrama tunnel would be lower than Tehachapi; the line to Urumqi in China is much higher – 11,000+ ft – but that is up on the Tibetan Plateau running on generally flat, if very high, terrain). The fact that they would both be major civil engineering works works in favor of my argument for Tejon, however. You do not gain anything in lower construction by going via Tehachapi. With CAHSRs plan you are actually losing this way, because they are planning to add ANOTHER mountain crossing by going directly under the San Gabriel mountains in two tunnels of over 20km each (each longer than the total tunneling required for Tejon or Tehachapi. If you have to do a lot of earth moving either way, move earth on the path that gives the shortest travel between LA and the Bay Area – Tejon.
Californians Continue to Love High-Speed Rail, Even if Republicans in Washington D.C. Don’t
https://cal.streetsblog.org/2025/08/21/californians-continue-to-love-high-speed-rail-even-if-republicans-in-washington-d-c-dont
tourist,
Losing a mere 4 billion of Federal funding out of a 100+ billion project is the sort of bad joke Californian politicians use to explain why the CAHSR project has been delayed for over a decade now.
I really doubt there’s much real support for CAHSR once voters start to understand the numbers and what it means to them as tax payers. California could have a one time head tax of $2000 for every man, women and child in the State and that *might* get the rail project back on track. (that’s what, roughly 80 billion?)
Just how much money do you think every family in Cali ought to pay for this? $10,000 + ? Because if you asked voters for the extra money it takes to finish this project most of the support will just evaporate.
All the Left Coast State and City governments have the same problem. It’s housing and transportation problems that the tax payers won’t fund solutions to. What the elected leaders do is blame the Federal government (Trump makes this really easy) for a lack of funding. Trouble is blaming the Feds or Trump or whatever….. doesn’t build any more housing for transit.
@tacomee
1) CAHSR will get the money back, no doubt about that.
If not from this admin the next.
2) CAHSR is gauranteeing 1 billion from C&T here on out
3) New game plan has private sector investment coming in
4) Bids for ballast, catenary and etc are out. Trains will be running
as scheduled, no need to bail.
It’s because they have seen California go from hardly no rail to massive subway, light & heavy commuter & Regional rail. Now they are building a racetrack that will stretch hundreds of miles & connect the most of the state with dependable, efficient transportation now & for 150 year life span.
The overarching goals that California people get are:
1. Without CASHR, both Northern and Southern California would need major new airports (costing tens of billions) and both would have to be sited at least 50 miles from the city centers (requiring billions more in new transit to get there anyway).
2. Getting to the southern Central Valley is tedious from either the Bay Area or Southern California.
We can argue about alignment and station details, methods of construction and how the environmental process are a problem. But the big picture goals and reasoning is plainly obvious to many.
Al S,
I’m going to politely disagree with the reasoning for building CAHSR. California isn’t a high growth State now, and isn’t likely to be in the future. There are huge problems with education, public safety, housing and local transit. California’s current transportation system is just fine with growth projections of 1-3%. The State can’t layoff police and public school teachers and continue to pump 100 billion into some silly train.
@ Tacomee:
It sounds like you haven’t lived with decades of California airport delays nor made Central Valley journeys very much. The project was justified and voted on a few decades and several million residents ago. The vote wasn’t based on speculative growth; it was based on the reality of 2008.
Plus air enplanements in 2024 have started growing again. LAX was 24 percent higher than when voters approved the concept in 2008.
https://www.lawa.org/lawa-investor-relations/statistics-for-lax/10-year-summary/passengers
And just like truck volumes, air cargo shipments are increasing significantly too. It’s a side effect of direct on-line ordering as opposed to going to a local department store.
You should not equate population growth with long distance demand growth. There are clearly a host of factors that effect demand .that you’re disregarding or forgetting about.
Northern California has 4 major airports already. I doubt a 5th airport will ever be considered. Oakland and Sac have multiple runways, and Sac in particular has been of space to expand.
Southern California has several existing airports that can add significant capacity by investing in bigger terminals & landside facilities, at a dramatically lower cost than a greenfield airport, much like Seattle will do with Paine Field and then perhaps a 3rd airport decades from now.
Al S.
I’d be the first to admit driving or flying to California isn’t easy. The trouble is the problems that CAHSR could solve don’t crack the top 10 problems of California. It’s politically impossible to spend over a 100 billion while local schools are laying off teachers and homeless camps are everywhere.
https://www.cbsnews.com/sacramento/news/state-leaders-announce-changes-california-high-speed-rail-project/
Even if California redraws the Congressional house maps to try to win more Democratic seats, it’s likely not to work because of this damn boondoggle train. It’s near impossible for pols to stand behind a project like this… In the grand scheme of US politics, CAHSR likely helps the Republican Party hold power in US House for at least a decade.
“California isn’t a high growth State now, and isn’t likely to be in the future.”
It already has some 40 million people in the cachement area. If that’s not enough for high-speed rail, then what is? It doesn’t need growth to justify it. Instead, it should have built it thirty years ago.
“Northern California has 4 major airports already. I doubt a 5th airport will ever be considered.”
The fourth Northern California airport is Sacramento. It no more serves San Jose than Vancouver BC Airport serves Seattle.
The three major Bay Area Airports all have multiple airside constraint issues (the landslide issues pale in comparison) that go back several decades. San Jose’s even has a forced curfew.
Southern California isn’t much better. John Wayne and Burbank are hemmed in by valuable development and both have plane curfews. LAX and Ontario are also hemmed in and require airside operational changes similar to a curfew.
Consider too that a far-flung airport will be impractical to reach using Uber or Lyft. Some sort of high speed ground transportation would be needed. If other existing airports are to become “major” the cost of building ground transportation (billions) along with expanded runways and terminals would still need to be spent.
With about 20 percent of Bay Area flights going to an LA airport, CAHSR can help push a reduction in airspace that has been needed for decades.
Mike Orr,
California does have 40 million people… but does every one of them have $2500 or $3000 to give to this ludicrous project? And we’re not done adding up the final cost yet… how about $5000 or more, for every man women and child in California.
There a whole bunch of problems in California that need to be addressed before finishing CAHSR. Newsome has some screwy cap-and-trade plan to fund a billion more a year? https://www.cbsnews.com/sacramento/news/state-leaders-announce-changes-california-high-speed-rail-project/
Here’s another real laugher from the article linked above….
“Democratic Senator Dave Cortese, who also serves as the Senate transportation chair, said the project failed because they were not looking at private sector money, and now they know how important this investment is.”
Private sector money?? And just “who” are “they” how important this project is?
Also from link…
“Cortese said the train will bring more to California than just connections, but economic development along the tracks, like housing. He hopes train riders and the development projects will eventually pay for themselves.”
What on earth is Cortese even talking about? Right now the project is what? 50 years from being done? (at the current speed of construction).
Supporting CAHSR means taking all the money from most (if not all) progressive projects in the State. 100 billion would build a lot of housing.
Sacramento serves the Bay Area the same as the Olympia and Bellingham airports serve central Puget Sound. I have flown into SAC both to visit friends who lived in a Bay Area suburb and to access Lake Tahoe.
“Consider too that a far-flung airport will be impractical to reach using Uber or Lyft.” Why would I consider that? Uber/Lyft can get me to Sacramento or Davis, but for the rest of northern California I can rent a car or be picked up. Transit and Rideshare serve a minority of airport trips.
“plane curfews” as a constraint is hilarious. So we need to spend billions on trains but we can’t possibly fly planes later in the evening? That’s like saying we need to build Link to Tacoma because it’s impossible to upgrade I5 from HOV2 to HOV3 (oh, wait…).
I care more about the passenger experience of getting across California than about costs, delays, or this particular project. I don’t know the details of the original budget, the magnitude or reasons for the increases. I haven’t lived in California for a long time so I feel like this project is their decision not mine. But if not this project, then what? I feel that high-speed rail between a region of 20 million and a region of 10 million should have been built long before this, so better late than never. The only passenger-experience concerns I’ve heard about this project is that the alignment at the southern end is not the shortest so it will add to travel time, and we still don’t know when the last-100-miles on both ends will be built.
Re who still thinks it’s a good idea, Alan Fisher does. I don’t know about California voters. Those who never wanted it won’t care if it’s canceled. Those who wanted to use it or have an HSR option are probably concerned about, if not this project, then what? We can’t have the next forty years be like the last forty years. Other countries are integrating HSR as a major component of general intercity mobility, and the US and California keep falling further behind.
Mike Orr,
“We can’t have the next forty years be like the last forty years. Other countries are integrating HSR as a major component of general intercity mobility, and the US and California keep falling further behind.”
You know, most of the residents in California think the State already has enough people in it and don’t care about “the 40 next years” much at all. A big story over the last 40 years has been how California NIMBYs locked up growth over much of the State. NIMBYs have already made a mess out of the CAHSR plans. California is what it is. Nothing is changing I can see.
America is “car country”. There’s huge development in Tennessee, Utah, Texas, Florida, the Carolinas. It’s all about families with kids, nice houses, 3 car garages. Transit isn’t a part of this. Because of the willingness of Red States to allow growth…. the Federal Government will likely be controlled by the GOP for a generation or more.
I feel bad for Seattle because it’s been the top West Coast city to allow growth. The whole CAHSR project is another matter because it’s been nothing but NIMBYs from the start.
@tacomee
Newsom and other state leaders (same as here) have been incrementally undoing the enviro-NIMBY regulations (Coastal, CEQA, zoning) of past decades. Housing affordability is a big topic, same as here.
I’ve lived recently in both Florida and Utah and through sprawl they are just turning a housing crisis into a transportation crisis. When all the kids grow up there they won’t be able to afford a house either. It’s basically the west coast story but a few decades behind.
Seattle IMO has been better than most by permitting new density instead of permitting new sprawl.
As an example, here’s the Pioneer Crossing stroad abomination built in Utah: https://maps.app.goo.gl/Hw8aTWxcBUMY7pig7
Those are painted bike lanes built on a 100+ ft right of way with 50mph speed limit. The road connects Lehi (regional job center) with Saratoga Springs and Eagle Mountain (sprawl boom towns)
(apologies for the triple comment)
Looks like this year Utah DOT is converting the Pioneer Crossing stroad to have directional time of day lanes. You really can’t make this stuff up: https://publicinput.com/t26733#tab-63229
But if not this project, then what? Water projects.
What’s the holdup in identifying an LA-Bakersfield corridor?
I’m going to break my silence on this topic, because I think it’s important to put some context around the discussion. I do know quite a bit of history about the project.
When the plan was proposed the route between Bakersfield and the San Luis Reservoir at the eastern end of Pacheco Pass was supposed to run in the median of I-5 where it could and lie alongside the roadway where it couldn’t. This would have made right-of-way accumulation quick, easy and cheap. It would also be a shorter route with a couple fewer station stops.
However, this route is through the boon-DOCKS, thirty to fifty miles west of SR99, and the leaders of the cities along the old route north of Bakersfield mounted a large lobbying effort to move the route of the HSR east to serve them. Where there is room along the BNSF right of way or paralleling highway 43 south of Fresno the planners have used it, but the line does not go through Hanford and Corcoran, but rather cuts a new path to the east of those cities. This has been quite contentious.
To the north of Fresno it appears that the route will be all new, since the BNSF diverts from SR99 north of Fresno.
All of this land acquisition in the heart of the world’s most expensive agricultural land has led to the tremendous cost overruns, and because many landowners will be faced with long circuiitous routings to fields on the “farside” of the HSR right-of-way, they have fought the project implacably,
It is my understanding that almost all of the land south of the “Chowchilla Wye” has been purchased. Grant, “almost” is doing a lot of work here, because the portion which remains is certainly the most contested and will cost still more money and delay.
That said, the land west of the Chowchilla Wye is MUCH less valuable than that along SR99 to the south, and a good portion of it is already in public hands because the San Joaquin River floodplain is about ten miles wide. And once the line leaves the bottomland of the San Joaquin Valley, the land is all in public ownership. Since some of it is Federal and Trump will do anything he can to irritate California’s government, it may be harder to cross the Coast Range now than it would have a few years ago, but it’s likely that right-of-way will be made available.
Since most of the land is in public ownership the biggest problem is the terrain which is chaotic from the San Andreas Fault running along its western flank. The mountains around Pacheco look like long crumpled rags. However, California has shown that it can handle crossing its crushed mountain ranges at will with its freeways. Railroads need gentler grades and wider curves, of course, but they also are MUCH narrower than a freeway which dials back some of the earth moving requirements.
Once the route gets to Morgan Hill, it will run parallel to the UP line, probably on supports because there are so many cross-roads. When trains reach San Jose they will use existing Caltrain tracks to run into San Francisco.
In brief, the worst fights about alignment are probably over, BUT, as Mike noted, there are still questions about the Bakersfield to San Fernanco segment. It has pretty much been determined that the base tunnel required by the steep grades of Tejon would be fatally weakened by crossing the San Andreas Fault line underground. It’s not clear how safely to engineer the half mile or so that is in the active fault safely.
Dig a huge empty cavern with the tunnel tubes supported in the void, perhaps from cables draped over lateral arches? That sounds like a good way to make sure that the movements of the rock structures don’t warp the tunnel. But it also weakens the rock overhead which might detach and crush the bores.
Build the cavern but fill it with gravel or something a bit bigger? OK, now, we have support for the roof! But all that gravel, if suifficiently pressured, might start acting like active rock, deforming the bore buried in it.
So, roughly following the UP line over Tehachapi has become the preferred route, and it again adds service to a population center which would be bypassed by the Tejon route. It would requires similar long “base tunnel” to that Tejon would but the north portal around Acton would be just south of the fault. There are smaller faults in the San Gabriel mountains, but they don’t have the power of the San Andreas so the engineers are more confident about being able to keep a bore safe in a local event.
With the base tunnel and the highly engineered pathway up Tehachapi from the Bakersfield side, the total distance via Palmdale is only about 30 miles longer than the Tejon Route would be. That’s because a Tejon route also leave Bakersfield headed southeast and use the north face of the mountains to get about halfway up Tejon by crossing the face of the mountains in a long oblique to lessen the length of the tunnel. The Tehachapi option is quite similar, just a few miles farther north.
From San Fernanco to LAUS the HSR’s will use the existing UP trackage with a third track added where possible for the speedsters to pass commuter and Amtrak California trains.
Yes, all this will cost $100 billion dollars to finish, and that doesn’t even include the San Diego extension which is another engineering and land acquisition nightmare. The naysayers have some good points. But California made a wise choice to serve the cities between Merced and Bakersfield. And who knows, maybe someday there will be enough ridership to lay that shortcut track along I-5 and get the overall travel time down to 2:00 between LAUS and The Moscone Center.
Thanks for the rundown Tom!
I might come off as anti-transit to some, but by and large I support actual transit service improvements. I can’t support building projects for 25+ years that fail tax payers in the here and now.
There’s an old farm saying, “Gotta make hay while the sun shines”. California couldn’t keep CAHSR on schedule when their economy is good. Now that things look less rosy, high speed rail is complete disaster. In all honesty California needs to scale back any big projects for the next 10 to 20 years.
Washington State isn’t nearly as bad off as California, but it’s still heading towards an aging population, less families with children, a flat or slowly growing population and shrinking tax base. Keeping all this in mind, the way forward for public transit isn’t big mega projects.
Here’s a couple of links that really lay out the problems in an easy to understand way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYXMQnJpa_M
“California couldn’t keep CAHSR on schedule when their economy is good. Now that things look less rosy, high speed rail is complete disaster.”
California was hit harder than most states in the Great Recession between 2009-2013. That affected both revenue and interest in CAHSR, which had funding approved in 2008. So it has faced worse economic situations that has been far from rosy.
A clarification to my original reply to Mike:
When I use the term “base tunnel” in reference to the Tehachapi route, I am referring to a base tunnel under the San Gabriels from somewhere north of Glendale to Acton not a base tunnel under Tehachapi. See my reply to Onux above about Tehachapi. He is completely off-base in claiming a 30 km tunnel there.
This project directly tells us all, how stupid and corrupt or Gov is!!!
His own commissioned studies say this project will NEVER make money and will always be subsidized by tax payers money.
You could say the same for any major airport in the USA. When was the last time the PDX or Sea-Tac airport operated at a profit? Or the Port of Seattle container terminal?
Okay, and what’s your point other than getting arm waving angry about how the sasague is made.
https://www.portseattle.org/blog/who-pays-sea-airport
I think SeaTac would turn a modest profit if it was allowed to. Most airports in Europe are privately operated. If the FAA would allow for higher fees (say, $30/person/flight rather than the current $12), the market would easily support most major American airports to turn a profit.
Operations, maybe. Including construction? No chance.
I have a real love-hate opinion about Nick’s (nandert’s) videos. His graphics are amazing and his story-telling narration makes points that are both true and entertaining. However, some of his visionary ideas can be a bit fantastic. His best videos comment on expansion progress, and current plans and studies.
I kind of wish he was living here and discussing Sound Transit and their recent expansion plans. It would help to shine a light on how we are building extensions that have no travel time savings, create terrible transfer slogs through stations and have projected low demand — and how ST lazily refuses to study different rail technologies and profiles because “it takes too long” (yet everything is already much more delayed than was promised in 2016 to the voters).
‘”ST lazily refuses to study different rail technologies and profiles because “it takes too long”’
ST doesn’t give a reason for not reevaluating technology; it just doesn’t want to. I haven’t heard it say “That would take too long.” When we and several people giving public testimony asked ST to reevaluate upgrading DSTT1 for 1.5 minute frequency instead of building DSTT2, the answer was, “A previous board in 2016 decided not to, and we’re not interested in reevaluating past decisions.” It seems to see that as a step backward. Another issue this came up with is canceling Sounder North. The board leaned toward “Voters in 1995 expected it to continue forever” and canceling it would go against the will of the voters. Since there’s no organized opposition, it’s impossible to point to a large number of voters who do want to cancel it, so the assumption is the voters overall don’t.
However, there are occasional steps in the other direction. In the run-up to ST3 the board said it would consider automated trains for Ballard and other upcoming lines, but then it never did. It said in ST3 it would consider reconfiguring CID1 station to be center-platform but it never did. Some boardmembers have suggested it might be time to cancel Sounder North when Everett/Paine Link open. That’s fifteen years in the future so we can’t tell now whether it will do it then.
Another factor is the mega-realignment it’s starting to discuss now. The budget shortfall and rising costs has gotten the board to start thinking about doing things it has heretofore refused to. So it’s possible that canceling Sounder North or automated lines might come back under that.
Mike, I pretty much agree with everything you say about ST. And yes they hide behind “the will of the voters” line when it’s convenient — but turn around and push through an alternative scheme like the county building redevelopment based on moving away from the keystone IDC station that was never the will of the voters.
Had our region had so bribe a Nick constructively pointing out these things with wonderful graphics and effective storytelling I think it would be very impactful.
A time-limited statement at an ST Board or committee meeting has almost no impact. I think it is merely performative. I have never seen a Board member even express agreement to a citizen statement — and certainly no significant changes to planning have come about because if them. The ST Board behaves like bullies with unchecked power. They never even acknowledge that they even listen.
And sadly I’ve cone to the same cowbckysion abiut public workshops run by ST as they are majority time lecturing to the crowd and responses are also time-limited (“Our workshop must end in 40 minutes after our 80-minute presentation, and we have no technical experts here”). Even written comments to DEIS documents don’t even get widely published. We’ve trusted our tax money and transit service to opinionated and fact-denying bullies with power.
The wording looks like it’s mangled. What did you intend, and I can correct it. The second paragraph, and “cowbckysion”. I assume worship should be workshop.
What’s time-limited? I can’t think of anything in ST’s decisions or public testimony that had a built-in expiration date.
Yes it’s workshop. Please correct that! Thanks!
The time limits are on the length of the workshop and not the entire project.
My point is more that ST calls public information meetings “workshops”. However it’s not a workshop. Calling it “workshop” is a blsntsnt lie.
A workshop is where things get designed, refined and/or improved. It is not a meeting where comments aren’t recorded, technical staff aren’t present and the program is the time allocation so there is no extended discussion.
That doesn’t sound like the workshops I’ve attended. Most open houses are just displays and maybe a presentation, and you give your feedback to staff individually or write it on a form. Occasionally there are workshops, and those have people sit at tables and discuss alignment maps or certain questions or brainstorming with their tablemates, and put together a group response.
It seems like CAHSR negotiated many pretty bad deals. They’ve done a lot of projects that also eliminates grade crossing but BNSF doesn’t need to pay anything for those benefit.
Yeah, every single CAHSR article I’ve read in recent months has to do with completing a grade separation between some busy highway and some busy BNSF or UP main line, neither of which are directly related to building high speed rail. It’s stuff they needed to do anyway and happens to be nearby.
I’ve watched Nick Andert (nandert)’s other hours-long videos about LA’s transit update. It feels like running a marathon watching it. This guy is brilliant and spares no detail.
Just pointing out a typo in the article. It’s Alan Fisher and not Adam Fisher. Feel free to edit and then delete this comment.
Corrected – thanks! I’ll leave it up to other mods to decide if they want to delete your comment.
Sorry I didn’t look at the name closely enough.
After watching Fisher’s video, I have to wonder if the California High Speed Rail difficulties would be repeated and magnified with building Cascadia High Speed Rail. The share of public land is lower with Cascadia. The geometric issues are more three dimensional. There isn’t a lot of flat farmland to use for the route. The Cascadia urban populations are much smaller (Bakersfield-Fresno area alone has the population of the Portland or Vancouver areas).
For these reasons I can’t get too excited about Cascadia HSR — if for no other reason than many of us will be dead on opening day decades from now. Perhaps a better strategy would be to focus on better intermodal connections and making deals with BNSF (track modifications) to enable faster and more frequent trains. And maybe we should just make a deal to electrify and separate crossings in the current corridor as part of that.
The thing is, Washington doesn’t need HSR. 110 or 125 mph would be sufficient to get to Portland in two hours, and that’s fast enough. California has 30 million people at the ends of a 400-mile stretch like a dumbbell. We have 4 million in the center, 2.5 million at the southern end 130 miles away (Portland, ignoring Eugene), and 0.2 million at the northern end 90 miles away (Bellingham, ignoring Vancouver BC and Canadian issues).
Exactly. Seattle/Vancouver/Portland is the right distance for rail at those speeds. In contrast San Fransisco/L. A. is the right distance (and the right amount of demand) for bullet trains. Reasonably fast trains to Portland or Vancouver (especially if you could skip the border B. S.) would be enough to compete with air travel while being much better than driving. But with San Fransisco to L. A. you need to be very fast to compete with the planes. CAHSR is a worthy project — they just need to build it.
RossB
But is CAHSR a worthy project? California has managed to survive without high speed rail since 1850. I doubt the voters would elevate CAHSR over any of the many . many problems currently facing the State, starting with housing.
“California has managed to survive without high speed rail since 1850.”
It survives in the sense that it hasn’t died. But people’s intercity mobility is not at the level of Europe or Asia, so that creates inefficiencies, makes people fly and drive more than they want to, or forego the trip because they don’t like the available travel options, or not move to California because of it, and it uses more fuel and energy than necessary, and the infrastructure takes up much more space than a train counterpart would. So it’s surviving but it’s not a great condition, especially if it’s going to just continue that way, and there also costs incurred by not having HSR, so the alternative isn’t zero cost.
I can’t speak for Portland-Seattle but the Seattle-Vancouver BNSF right of way actually runs through a lot of flat farmland. An incremental upgrade to 125mph on the flat part could be relatively cheap.
There’s also a pipe dream of public ownership of the railroad that could enable more proactive upgrades https://www.theurbanist.org/2025/08/14/op-ed-pcc-provides-model-for-state-rail-ownership-in-washington-state/
The problem for Seattle-Bellingham is the narrow coastal flat area between Ballard and Everett and I don’t remember how far north it goes. It doesn’t look practical to widen it or to eliminate northern freight service to make room for more passenger trains.
They started moving dirt for this in 2015. As of now there’s not even a portion of it in service yet. When the transcontinental railroad was built in the 1800’s it was finished in 6 years. Yes I know how the workers were treated. They still overcame all the obstacles without any of the equipment & engineering we have today. Bright line is just now starting on their LA to Vegas high speed with service expected to start in 2028. FLY NAVY!!!
“As of now there’s not even a portion of it in service yet.”
That’s just not true. The CAHSR portion between San Francisco and San Jose is to use the Caltrain corridor. CAHSR paid for over a third of the electrification and it’s running with new trains today. It’s been quite successful, making the full journey 20-35 minutes faster ( varies by service pattern) and attracting lots of new riders (+41%).
Here’s a joint statement that includes a quote from the CAHSR head:
https://www.gov.ca.gov/2025/04/09/ridership-for-this-critical-train-line-is-surging-thanks-to-californias-investments-in-rail/
They may not be branded as high speed rail trains, but there is faster transit service currently running as a result of the CAHSR investment.
Those pundits that hate the project keep spreading this LIE that there’s nothing to show for the investment except an empty bridge in Fresno (watch the video in the originating post) and people believe it after awhile. We need to call out the LIE every time we see it.
There’s actually quite a lot of it that is in service.
If by “it” you mean projects that are being funded by CAHSR that only tangentially benefit the construction of the line.
Eg: several dozen grade crossing separations have been completed which take various roads and highways over the BNSF or Union Pacific main lines. Eventually, CAHSR will go under them too, but for now it’s basically a huge highway grade separation project to allow BNSF freight traffic to not interfere with local highway traffic.
Currently under construction are more such projects that are more benefit for local road traffic than CAHSR: Fresno County Central Avenue, Madera County Road 26 and Avenue 17, Fresno Church Avenue Grade Separation, Fresno County Nebraska Avenue, and Fresco County Manning Avenue are all efforts at separating existing railroad traffic from highway traffic, and only really tangentially providing additional space under them for the high speed rail line. Only about 3 or 4 current projects are actually bridges associated with only the high speed rail line itself.
If the project were actually about only building high speed rail lines, you’d probably see a lot more viaduct above or cutting below existing infrastructure, as done in France or Japan. Instead, it seems like a bunch of it is just highway improvements.
So… after carefully researching everything connected with this High Speed Rail project I predict it will be completed in 2047 (August 13th) at a cost of $303 Billion. That’s all, TWS.
The Urbanist just dissected this consultant’s report discussing Link’s operational deficiencies stemming from bad design choices:
https://www.theurbanist.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/HNTB-Sound_Transit_Resiliency_Assessment_Report_FINAL_SUBMISSION_3_11_25_Distribution.2025.pdf
The Urbanist article is here:
https://www.theurbanist.org/2025/08/25/sound-transits-2-line-faces-hurdles-beyond-crossing-i-90-bridge/
The article highlights two key failure points. One is the difficulty of maintaining four minute headways while reversing trains at Lynnwood.
The other is the inability to maintain anything but 24 minute headways if a track or platform is blocked in the DSTT or between U Dustrict and Northgate because of a lack of crossovers.
These potential problems have been mentioned by myself and others so it’s not news to the regulars.
Just thank goodness someone at ST actually talked to an operations expect rather than deny that these problems exist. While it is somewhat validating that these problems were naively unaddressed, it mainly leaves me shaking my head at the arrogant management at ST not seeing these problems way before ST3 went on the ballot.
This is just one more reason why ST should instead be led by people who know how to run a rail system rather than ones that schmooze elected officials and stakeholders but have never run a big rail system before.
TriMet operates the yellow/orange line at only 15 minute headways most of the time (there’s a couple of spots in the timetable with tightly spaced trains), and they installed three track stations at the end of those lines.
It seems like three track stations at Tukwila, Federal Way, Northgate, and Lynnwood would be prudent.
They started moving dirt for this in 2015. As of now there’s not even a portion of it in service. When the transcontinental railroad was built in the 1800’s it was finished in 6 years. I am well aware of how the workers were treated. But they still overcame all the obstacles. Bright line is just now starting on the LA to Vegas high speed. Service is expected to start in 2028. FLY NAVY!!!