They're doling out the largesse from the infrastructure bill in large chunks now, the latest installment a $3B investment in a high-speed rail link between Southern California and Las Vegas.
The federal government has announced it will spend $3B to pay for the initial phase of an electric high-speed light rail link between Rancho Cucamonga, an Inland Empire city about 50 miles east of Downtown Los Angeles, and Las Vegas.
The rail line, which will run alongside the 15 Freeway in the Mojave Desert, will cost an estimated $12B to complete. What will eventually become a 218-mile-long project is aiming for a ribbon-cutting at the end of 2027, in time for the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.
The Federal Rail Administration has granted environmental and right-of-way approvals for the first phase, a 49-mile stretch of rail between Rancho Cucamonga and the High Desert.
Federal officials are estimating that the new rail line will remove an estimated 3 million cars from I-15, the primary highway link between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, reducing carbon emissions by an estimated 400,000 tons annually.
The rail line will be a boon to Rancho Cucamonga, with Cucamonga Station expected host more than 11M passengers annually. The rail project will bring an estimated economic impact of $5B to San Bernardino County.
The new rail line will be modeled after Florida's Brightline service. With trains reaching speeds of almost 200 mph, the SoCal line will be able to reduce the travel time from Rancho Cucamonga to Las Vegas to two hours from four hours.
Hopefully, the new rail line will not suffer the same fate as Amtrak's Acela service on its heavily traveled rail connection between Boston and Washington DC.
Amtrak is preparing to put into service in 2024 a fleet of 28 new high-speed trains, each with the capability of running at speeds of up to 200 mph. Here's the dirty little secret: none of the sleek new trains will be able travel that fast, at least not for the rest of the current decade, because of the condition of the tracks.
As anyone who has sat through a trip on the Boston-New York-Washington DC corridor can tell you, the ancient and deteriorating tracks won't permit the newest trains to go half as fast as they're designed to travel.
According to a recent report in Scientific American, Amtrak's newest Acela models will be limited to speeds slower than 110 mph in most segments of the Boston-to-DC route, and they've been designed to limit top speeds to 160 mph.
Kind of like buying a Porsche that can't get out of second gear. The United States has fallen so far behind China and Europe in rail service, you can put us in the Third World category.
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