Work is set to begin Monday on a $12 billion high-speed passenger rail line between Las Vegas and the Los Angeles area, with officials projecting millions of ticket-buyers will be boarding trains by 2028.
Brightline West, whose sister company already operates a fast train between Miami and Orlando in Florida, aims to lay 218 miles (351 kilometers) of new track between a terminal to be built just south of the Las Vegas Strip and another new facility in Rancho Cucamonga, California. Almost the full distance is to be built in the median of Interstate 15, with a station stop in San Bernardino County’s Victorville area.
In a statement, Brightline Holdings founder and Chairperson Wes Edens called the moment “the foundation for a new industry.”
Brightline aims to link other U.S. cities that are too near to each other for flying between them to make sense and too far for people to drive the distance, Edens said.
I’m glad one of these is finally getting off the ground. So far we haven’t seen anything high speed in the US, just “fast”.
I’m afraid the money in our politics makes it impossible to get projects like these off the ground. There’s too much effort to line their own pockets by politicians, and not enough effort to serve their constituents.
This specific line was first proposed in the Clinton or maybe even Bush Sr administration. It changed concept so many times I really never though a single rail would ever get put down.
At one point there was even talk of connecting it to the monorail that runs down 30% of the strip. I think that’s when I lost hope.
Do you remember the highspeed rail from LA to SF we paid billions and billions towards? I remember voting against it saying, “if this is up and running in less than a decade I’d be shocked.” 20 years later it isn’t up and running.
Add in Elon’s bullshit Boring Company purposeful distractions to kill this project and the abuse of any environmental impact studies and you see why these projects never seem to get off the ground.
At least this project seems to have the approvals done, and they’ll probably move quicker being a company vs. government built.
I like how they announced the San Diego to Seattle line again, for the 4th (I think) time in 20ish years, only this time it’s missing half of Oregon. So if you want to go the whole way it’ll be high speed rail from San Diego to Medford, Oregon, then ¯\(ツ)/¯, then Portland (or possibly Eugene) to Seattle on high speed rail again.
High fives all around! We did it!
There’s a lack of stops in Oregon in that gap? Or there’s an actual gap in the rail line?
Gap. The Cascades kill the budget, so they want to skip most of them.
Maybe they’re hoping, once the rest of it is built there’ll be enough interest/potential to get the expensive part financed?
I think that’s the goal. My head canon is that somewhere in the committee an engineer familiar with the PNW finally said “You know if you try to go over the southern passes the line will be down for 2 months out of the year because of storms.” Then they showed their tunnel math and plans suddenly changed.
I don’t know anything about it but my instincts say that could be one soggy heavy (and therefore expensive) tunnel.
Well Lyle Lanley was in charge of the project at the time they were going to connect it to the Monorail.
Ogdenville, North haverbrook. That line was gonna connect everywhere.
Which is why Brightline takes private money to get it done.
That and they’re using a right of way in the median of the highway, which is much cheaper than trying to get other land rights. Some law on the books about land adjacent to highways being available for rail.
Ah. Another Private Public Partnership.
We have those in Canada. Inevitably they fail, but not so much they’d actually die and leave room for replacement.
Those will be the public-private partnerships who have reached full enshittification. Because that’s what their boards direct them to do.