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The Brightline West system will reach speeds of 200 miles per hour across a 218-mile route between Las Vegas and three California stops including Rancho Cucamonga, about 40 miles east of Los Angeles...The project received $3 billion in funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the rest will be privately funded...

Hey, a hundred billion here, a hundred billion there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money. But apparently not real progress.When I first started writing about California's high-speed rail boondoggle thirteen years ago, its advocates claimed they could connect Los Angeles and San Francisco for $33 billion. After getting $3.5 billion from the Obama administration, the number grew to $42 billion, and even then critics put closer to nine figures. Despite calling the project a "train wreck," the LA Times editorial board endorsed the project and a new state board that was supposed to exercise fiscal discipline and enforce...

California's mega high-speed rail project between San Francisco to Los Angeles faces major funding hurdles VIDEO AT LINK.....................

A proposed high-speed passenger train between Las Vegas and Southern California got another boost on Tuesday with Biden administration approval to issue $2.5 billion in tax-exempt bonds for the $12 billion project. The announcement benefiting the Brightline West project followed a $3 billion U.S. Department of Transportation grant in December and government authorization in 2020 for the company to sell $1 billion in similar bonds. ... The 218-mile (351-kilometer) Brightline West project aims to whisk passengers at 186 mph (300 kph) or more in electric trains on new tracks along the Interstate 15 corridor ... No date has been announced...

The city of San Francisco is in the process of constructing a downtown-area railroad extension that is estimated to cost in excess of $4 billion per mile of tunnel, The San Francisco Standard reported. The extension, known as The Portal, is a tunneled rail service that would connect the Salesforce Transit Center in the city’s downtown corridor to Caltrain and future high-speed trains, according to the Standard. The project’s overall cost estimate was recently revised up from $6.5 billion to a total of $8.25 billion, which makes for a per-mile cost of over $4 billion, ... “[Y]ou’re seeing some whopping...

The latest figures show an undeniable correlation between an increase in violent crime and immigration.. The number of knife attacks recorded at train stations in Germany has more than doubled since 2019, and foreign nationals are greatly overrepresented when analyzing the ethnicity of suspects. By Aug. 31 this year, the German Federal Police had already recorded 527 violent crimes in which a knife had been used at German train stations — the equivalent of more than two knife attacks a day on average. The figures were provided by the federal government following a request by Martin Hess, an MP for...

Government is urged to implement action plan to address this issue before the 2024 Olympics ... With the Paris Olympics less than a year away, French authorities want to make sure the bedbugs don't bite during the games and have started a drive to exterminate the pests. Social media users have been publishing footage of the insects crawling around in high-speed trains and the Paris metro, alongside a rash of online articles about bedbugs in cinemas and even Charles de Gaulle airport. The reports have reached the highest levels of government. "The state urgently needs to put an action plan...

California High-Speed Rail, the most ambitious public transportation project in the state’s history, is still miles away from being completed, despite decades of discussion and nearly ten years of construction. Progress has kicked up in recent years as environmental hurdles were cleared, and the High-Speed Rail Authority hopes to have the Central Valley segment, which will connect Merced to Bakersfield, completed by 2030 (give or take). But what would it take to get the entire project — Bay Area to Los Angeles — completed even sooner? Maybe as soon as 2028, in time for the Olympics?

<p>If you answered “California’s high speed rail line to nowhere” you win an evening with Nancy Pelosi!!</p><p>Okay. That was blatantly false. She’d never agree to that and I shouldn’t have teased you with even the possibility – get your hopes up and all.</p>

A high-speed bullet train connecting LA to Sin City is currently in the works - thanks to a billionaire private equity investor and some prospective federal funding. Billed as Brightline West, the planned desert route is the brain child of Wes Edens - a part owner of both the Bucks and Aston Villa FC - and will cost at least $12 billion to create. Its part of his vision to create high-speed lines between some of America's least traversable - and most traveled - paths, with the 270-mile stretch between the starcrossed cities a prime candidate for the gargantuan undertaking....

It sounded too good to be true, and it was. Travel from downtown San Francisco to downtown Los Angeles in two hours via high-speed rail. California voters in 2008 approved Proposition 1A, authorizing $9.95 billion in general obligation bonds to build this so-called “bullet train.” They were told not only that the total cost would only be $33 billion but also that the entire 500-mile system would be running by 2030. Fat chance. In March of this year, the California High-Speed Rail Authority released its latest progress report. The project is now projected to cost $127 billion, and there is...

The latest report from the California High-Speed Rail Authority projects costs for the initial segment at $35 billion, which exceeds secured funding by $10 billion. Other segments of the system are likely to have their projected costs increase, too. The state hopes it will get more federal aid.

Last February the California High-Speed Rail Authority announced that the price for the state’s planned bullet train had gone up from $100 billion to $105 billion. A few months later they clarified it was actually going to be $113 billion. Yesterday there were more reports about delays and price increases.High Speed Rail Authority officials on Thursday could not provide an estimated completion date for the original vision pitched to voters but said the price tag for the entire project is now up to $128 billion, a 13% increase from last year’s projections…Construction is currently focused on a segment in the...

Well, it’s big in Japan...That is what proponents of California’s high speed rail project say when asked about the whys and wherefores of the system. In other words, if it works somewhere else it will work here.That argument, though, falls in the face of a rather basic fact: California and Japan are different.It is true that Japan’s high speed rail system, first begun in 1964, actually makes money – a lot, in fact. The iconic first line, Shinkansen Tokaido, alone carries 90 million people a year and has an operating profit of about $4.4 billion dollars. That does not include...

The Société nationale des chemins de fer français (SNCF), a French state-owned railroad operator, came to California in hopes of helping the state build a high-speed rail system from Los Angeles to San Francisco but left for North Africa in 2011 because the region was 'less politically dysfunctional' than the Golden State. Within 7 years, they built a functioning high-speed rail system in Morocco, the New York Times reported. California sought to have the first high-speed rail system in the country, but a new report from the Times showed political disagreement on the train's route slowed the ambitious project to...

This New York Times article on the failure of California’s high speed rail reminds me of the chapter “The Moratorium on Brains” from Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged.In that chapter from the fictional book, everyone on a passenger train died because the train was controlled by politics instead of common sense.This new article from the New York Times explains how the real world train’s ridiculous, absurd, irrational route was chosen based on politics instead of on common sense.The New York Times article states:“… the design for the nation’s most ambitious infrastructure project was never based on the easiest or...

TOKYO Japan is very proud of its trains, and in many ways rightfully so. The country has one of the cleanest, most reliable, and most convenient rail networks to be found anywhere on the planet. But it isn’t perfect, and the undeniably worst part of train travel in Japan is the possibility of encountering a chikan, or groper, onboard. Rail operators have tried various countermeasures to attempt to prevent gropings, but the actions of one East Japan Railway Co (JR East) worker have been drawing criticism after a video taken at Shinjuku Station in downtown Tokyo on Aug 30 recently...

China’s high-speed rail network includes 37,900 kilometers (about 23,500 miles) of lines that crisscross the country to link all of its major mega-city clusters. All have been completed since 2008. No major incidents have been reported on the network since 2011, when 40 people were killed and nearly 200 others injured after a high-speed train was struck from behind by another train near Wenzhou, Zhejiang province.

Ed Morrissey wrote a story about the costs of California’s high speed rail project going up back in August 2011. More than ten years later, we’re still seeing that story repeated over and over. Last January, we learned from a contractor’s letter that project delays were “beyond comprehension,” often thanks to failures by the state to buy needed property to build on. ... The cost to build California’s ambitious but long delayed high-speed rail line has once again risen, with rail officials now estimating it could take up to $105 billion to finish the line from San Francisco to Los...

The California bullet train is facing at least another billion dollars of proposed cost increases from its contractors... The state’s High-Speed Rail Authority has mostly approved such increases in the past, and if it does so again, contractors could proceed with one of the biggest price escalations since bullet train construction began in the San Joaquin Valley. The state has budgeted $22.8 billion to build a partial segment from Bakersfield to Merced. Originally, construction of the Los Angeles to San Francisco system was pegged at $33 billion. But the surging costs will probably force the state to dig deeper into...