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Amtrak, the national passenger railroad company of the U.S., continues to have routine breakdowns despite receiving massive injections of taxpayer dollars from the Biden administration, according to data from the Department of Transportation (DOT). Since 2021, there have been 333 Amtrak train incidents reported nationwide as of July 9, 2024, slightly less than the 397 incidents that occurred between 2016 and July 2020 during former President Trump’s tenure, according to the DOT. The Biden administration, as a part of an announced $66 billion for passenger rail in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, has dedicated huge amounts of taxpayer cash to Amtrak,...

On July 6, due to an ongoing electric power issue, Amtrak canceled service between Boston and New York City for the remainder of the day. Amtrak is communicating directly with impacted customers about this service interruption and offering options for rebooking their travel plans. Amtrak apologizes for any inconvenience caused by the disruption. Our crews are working hard to correct the issues.

California’s massive and ambitious project to connect downtown Los Angeles with the Bay Area via electric trains capable of reaching speeds of over 200 mph has cleared its biggest hurdle to date. On Thursday, the California High-Speed Rail Authority received complete environmental approval between the two regions, a historic milestone in a state notorious for holding up construction projects for environmental review.

The High Speed Rail Authority shared an update on the Fresno River Viaduct .. They were widely mocked with Elon Musk and Billy Markus piling in .. California has been mercilessly mocked for boasting about completing the 'world's most pointless crossing' to nowhere at a cost of $11billion. The California High Speed Rail Authority shared an update on the Fresno River Viaduct in Madera County last week, proudly saying it was one of the 'first completed high-speed rail structures'. The Tweet did not get the reaction officials were hoping for with Elon Musk and Dogecoin creator Billy Markus piling in...

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...