Posted on 08/10/2024 6:33:51 PM PDT by artichokegrower
Caltrain, the oldest continually operating rail service west of the Mississippi River, once again became a pioneer Saturday with the debut of its new electric fleet
(Excerpt) Read more at sfchronicle.com ...
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who helped secure $1.2 billion in federal funds for the roughly $2.4 billion project.
51 miles at $2.4 billion. Not good at math but is that $44 million per mile.
Been hearing about this thing all my long life.
Traveling time bomb!
I double posted. Sorry. Please fix - delete one!
Transcontinental Railroad was 60 million 1863 dollars (bonds) or 1.2 Billion today. We not only build things the way we used to but paying is also a obvious problem.
Any copper wire on the tracks? it will be gone in a week.
Could have gotten electric locomotives for the push-pull cars instead and saved much more money. This is big public waste.
I was riding CalTrain when the OJ verdict happened. They announced it over the speakers. Many passengers began cheering and celebrating.
That would get you almost all the way across the DFW metroplex. (Sunnvale to White Settlement 56.9 mile East to West, per Google. Red Oak to Prosper is only 54 miles South to North.)
WILL NEVER GET BUILT
Do they have sprinkler systems to clean up after the homeless defecate and urinate in the cars?
Zero emissions, well not so, unless the electric is produced by fairy dust.
A luxury rail line to house homeless and transport them along the 51 mile stretch. It will be glorious.
AOC says the planet will be dead before those trains are available for wide use....no?
Some things never change. Lots of corruption and graft involved in the build of the Transcontinental Railroad. The big 4 barons building the western section played fast and loose with the accounting, and pocketed a lot of fraudulently obtained funds. Stanford, Crocker, Huntington and Hopkins were the Big 4 Barons. Leland Stanford gov of California and founder of Stanford University, Charles Crocker of Crocker Bank fame, Collis Huntington of Huntington Hotel fame, and Mark Hopkins Jr. of Mark Hopkins Hotel fame.
One of the things they did was to bill the fed gov for mountainous mileage to build, way beyond the actual miles of terrain, same for foothill distance, both of which were higher cost than flatlands. Another was to overbill passengers and give false promises of destination facilities. Lots of cheating garnered them millions of dollars which they used to build extravagant mansions and hotels. Lots of politicians also got rich from bribes.
“$44 million per mile”
Hey, stringing wire is expensive! They had to buy 100 times more copper wire than needed because the thieves kept stealing 99% of the stored wire. (I just made that up)
A lot of infrastructure for the Caltrain electric trains is already built. Here on the SF Peninsula, we suffered during construction of many parts of the project. Torn-up streets and intersections while they built elevated sections and lowered streets under the sections, tunnels thru downtown business districts in suburban towns, etc.
The sad part is that they pushed for replacing the diesel passenger trains with electric trains, to supposedly go green and have "clean" rail. Sad, because the diesel trains already have electric motors at the wheels and the diesel engines provide electricity to the electric motors; power for the new electric trains will still need fossil fuels to provide the electricity.
Another thing - all this was done because of the high-speed rail train project which will share right-of-way with the Caltrain passenger rail. There won't be any high-speed going on when sharing rail through all the towns up and down the SF Peninsula, rail traffic will slow to a crawl.
51 miles at $2.4 billion. Not good at math but is that $44 million per mile.
They needed special material for the tracks to handle the high speed trains. They had to mine the metal used for the track on the planet Uranus.
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