But that’s my point. Why does it matter that other areas are more needy? We are brainwashed into this system where states provide the bulk of financing and consider it a gift that the feds give us anything. Really, the feds should be taking the bulk of financing for something considered basic in other countries, but weve been brainwashed into believing its some type of privilege and they owe us nothing.

Federal gov should be offering 80/20 split to every worthy needed project.

Agreed, but the two corridors are technically apples/oranges in the same way that CAHSR vs. LOSSAN are apples/oranges.

And I'll reiterate while I have the floor that CAHSR will upgrade a significant chunk of the LOSSAN corridor, specifically the stretch between Burbank and Anaheim.

They should also work on increasing the speed of the LA - San Luis Obispo section to 125 mph.

It's roughly 100 miles from Santa Barbara to LA Union Station. Just getting that stretch upgraded to 125mph electric would improve service into LA for everyone to the north. It's interesting to think about electrifying that line all the way north to Gilroy, but that would be a little over 300 miles of electrification, so a big, big project. They'd probably want to dig a 3~mile tunnel to avoid the climbs and switchbacks at San Luis Obispo. They could turn the existing line into a pretty nice rec trail.

This high-speed rail project is a warning for the US
California's "train to nowhere" shows the challenges ahead.
Vox Video - Jul 29, 2022
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0dSm_ClcSw

China can do, but US can not.

Another video lamenting the route that goes where people live.

Nonsense.

They somehow completely miss the fact that there will be express trains that won't stop in the Central Valley cities.

I think the goal is to not have it built, since the other option is actually having it be a train to nowhere (like along I-5). Well a train going through nowhere...

I'm fine with an offshoot along the 1-5, as long as it's just that, an offshoot. After phase 1 and 2 are that could be built. But the first phase absolutely must run through the large central valley cities

That Vox video also completely ignores that the Central Valley on its own is larger than 30 US states population wise and would be quite a large state separately too. So there's plenty of need for rail services in that part of the state on its own and having it form the backbone of the HSR corridor is just the right way to future proof the project.

California high-speed rail wins $25 million U.S. grant, seeks $1.3 billion more

By David Shepardson
Reuters
Aug. 11, 2022

"WASHINGTON, Aug 11 (Reuters) - California's High-Speed Rail Authority said Thursday it won $25 million in new federal grant funding to advance its project beyond 119 miles under construction, while pursuing an additional $1.3 billion award..."

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/cal...re-2022-08-11/

Elon Musk’s Hyperloop idea was just a ruse to kill California’s high-speed rail project

https://www.fresnobee.com/opinion/ed...264451076.html

Not surprising. Such a duplicitous spaz.

Construction Progress
 

Just looked over the drone videos on the Drone Zone's youtube channel found here: https://www.youtube.com/c/DRONEZONEFlyovers/videos

There is a lot of activity on the Hanford Viaduct, and even those videos are a month old. I was really surprised at the the progress on Veterans Blvd in Fresno (It's called Golden State Blvd realignment on the youtube channel). The bridge over the freight lines and high speed rail is done (and has been done for a while, but there is now LOTS of work in progress for the overpass of the new Golden State Blvd. realignment and the rest of the interchange over the freeway. Also noticed in another video that the freight line has finally been moved so construction can be completed next to State Route 180 under the rail spur and the canal for the trench. All in all there is quite a bit of progress on many bridges and structures that I hadn't seen. Well worth the view.

John S.

That Drone Zone channel does some good videos even if theres no narration and the public domain music is just dreadful. I've beeen watching those whenever they come out to scratch my itch between Four Foot corridor tours. Speaking of which that guy hasnt uploaded a video in ages.

Yeah the four foot had really high quality vids.

The Four Foot recently replied to someone on Twitter and said he wasn't sure he'd be able to make it to California this year. (He's a freight train engineer, and that job is not very compatible with having spare time, from what I hear!) I believe his last batch of CaHSR videos were recorded last August.

^ Yeah, I figured his real job as an engineer has limited his ability to do youtube. His raw insight into what it's really like to be on a train crew is pretty illuminating. Certainly strips much of the romance of railroad lore out of it. The modern Class 1 railroad work culture sounds terrible... Just look at what was in the news recently about the potential for a nationwide strike amongst rail workers to protest the unlivability of it all.

"the design for the nation’s most ambitious infrastructure project was never based on the easiest or most direct route.
Instead, the train’s path out of Los Angeles was diverted across a second mountain range to the rapidly growing suburbs of the Mojave Desert,
a route whose most salient advantage appeared to be that it ran through the district of a powerful Los Angeles county supervisor.
The dogleg through the desert was only one of several times over the years when the project fell victim to political forces that have added billions of dollars in costs and called into question whether the project can ever be finished."
NewYorkTimes By Ralph Vartabedian Oct. 9, 2022

Ralph Vartabedian really does hate high-speed rail. I guess we wasn't content just righting his anti-rail screeds for the LA Times.

His points all seem valid. And French TGV authorities made the same points, as did the original founders of CAHSR. If you want HSR in the U.S. you want this project to work. Why do all the transit experts say this project is madness?

CAHSR is pretty much the first project of its kind, anywhere. It started as a standard HSR project but has now morphed into a weird wildly overengineered commuter rail/jobs/economic justice project. The pronouncements are bizarre. They actually believe that routing an LA-SF line through random population centers strengthens the project, as if a NY-Atlanta flight benefits by flying over Charlotte.

The alignment is completely fu----ed up. The motivations are all wrong. They claim the poorest and most job-desperate areas are the highest priorities. If you take them at their word, rural Mississippi would be the best U.S. location for HSR. There will probably never be a complete LA-SF HSR line.

Lol.

"They actually believe that routing an LA-SF line through random population centers strengthens the project, as if a NY-Atlanta flight benefits by flying over Charlotte."

You do realize that part of the reason this project even got started was because of promises to better connect inland California to the Bay Area and LA Metro right?
And yes, it does strengthen the project.

"The alignment is completely fu----ed up. The motivations are all wrong. There will probably never be a complete LA-SF HSR line"

The alignment is fine. Explained what you mean by motivations. And the last sentence is just nonsense.

No.

The project was an attempt to connect LA to SF. It had nothing to do with a bullet train to Bakersfield, or any of the later nonsense. That was all political horsetrading and bizarre mission creep.

CAHSR was a response to the flight congestion between LA and SF, and an attempt to put airline passengers on trains. It had nothing to do with the Central Valley, or equity, or lifting areas out of poverty, etc. It should have no purpose but connecting LA to SF, like every other bullet train on earth. Connecting transit-oriented population centers in minimal time. Not serving as a jobs program, economic development program, and all the other crap.

The newer angle is that's a superfast commuter train, basically. The original LA-SF airline killing objective (the objective of every other HSR line) has been thrown out. Given that HSR has insane costs, the only way it functions for commuters is by massively subsidizing tickets. And it cannot simultaneously function as a commuter line and business line for long-distance passengers.

Oh jeez here we go again. Notice Grouchy Ralphy makes no mention of the fact the Grapevine mountain crossing was deemed seismically problematic due to the angle the fault would be crossed.

Crawford, your comments must be some elaborate joke at that's going over my head, because if they aren't then they're just complete nonsense.

Read the article. I'm not saying anything that isn't being said by French rail authorities, outside rail experts, or the original leadership of CAHSR.

The project is trying to satisfy a bunch of conflicting objectives. There's only one objective - taking LA-SF plane ridership.

If Memphis was a metro of 10 million and Mobile was a metro of 15 million, don't you think Jackson and a few of the towns along the way would benefit from a stop?

I just think the bias against California's Central Valley is so strong that people aren't able to imagine it as anything other than what it is at present.

Lyon, France has a metro population of under 2 million. It's smaller than Sacramento. Every TGV train stops there.

No. Building such an HSR route would be crazy, given the region's auto orientation. HSR works in centralized, transit-oriented destinations, competing with flights.
HSR isn't going to change the Central Valley into HSR corridors like Frankfurt-Paris, Madrid-Barcelona or Tokyo-Osaka. Again, this is mission creep. It was about LA-SF.

Lyon is also a highly centralized, transit-oriented metro, with a huge existing rail infrastructure. Excepting NYC, it probably has a more developed rail system than anywhere in North America. The only CA towns that plausibly meet the criteria for HSR are LA and SF (and maybe SD, but that's really stretching it).

The Central Valley metros have some of the lowest transit shares in the entire U.S. You could hardly pick worse locales for HSR. They're up there with Tulsa, Birmingham, Amarillo, etc. Ridership from Central Valley will be minimal unless they subsidize it as a commuter line.

^LAX is pretty damn big for not having a rail connection. But according to you, people will only ride HSR - which exists entirely and exclusively to compete with airlines - if there is a subway or tram connection.

I don't think that anyone has any delusion that Bakersfield, Fresno, et al, will evolve into Tuscan hill towns with the benefit of HSR. People will mostly take a cab or be dropped off.

Mission creep? This route is what's in the 2008 business plan. Fresno, Hanford, Bakersfield, and Palmdale were all planned stations on the route back then.

None of those make any sense. This is HSR. HSR only makes sense for point-to-point service between centralized, transit-oriented locales.

For an LA-SF route, there should be two stations. Maybe three if the line passes anywhere near San Jose. If it ever got to San Diego, maybe one in OC. The rest is garbage, and completely undermining the point of HSR. It's the same market as business flights, at least in the U.S. context. People willing to pay high cost for rapid, reliable point-to-point service.

It makes plenty of sense for it to connect the population centers in the valley. Millions of people live along the route, and we must not ignore them. There will still be SF-LA express trains that do not stop in between.

The plan for hooking up with the Central Valley was in place from the beginning. So it wouldn't be mission creep. I think Crawford just disagrees with the mission.

I fall somewhere in the middle. I think stops in Fresno and Bakersfield are fine, but I'd probably get rid of Gilroy, Madera, and Kings/Tulare stations, as well as Merced and Modesto while we're at it.

So it'd be, from North to South, SF, SFO, SJ, Fresno, Bakersfield, Palmdale, Burbank, LA. There should also be an express line that skips Fresno, Bakersfield, and Palmdale entirely.

Yeah, but Crawford also is misrepresenting this history of the project :)

The plan is to have trains that don't stop at all between SF and LA, trains that stop at major stations, and trains that stop at every station. If the route goes from Bakersfield to Fresno, I see no reason not to have a Kings-Tulare station, for instance. (That particular one will connect to the future cross valley corridor service.)

...and as I have noted here in past posts, the absolute shortest practical route between LA and SF (actually San Jose) is 40~ miles shorter than what is being built. An express train operating at 220mph covers 40 miles in about 12 minutes.

That's the strength of high speed rail - it's so damn fast that a deviation between points A and B costs almost no time, especially when the full door-to-door time is considered.

To the extent SNCF was ever seriously interested helping bring about HSR in California, it's telling that it would be the shortest, most direct and easiest to construct route. From an investment point of view, those things minimize risk and maximize potential profit. But this is no way to construct once-in-a-lifetime infrastructure, be it HSR or otherwise. The objectives should be balanced between cost and benefit. Like the old expression goes, what's good for a foreign government isn't always good for California.

Absolutely. 12 minutes to connect those population centers in the valley is totally worth it!

Of course, that's not the only consideration that should be taken into account.

I think the chosen alignment through the population centers of the Central Valley is going to be what might ultimately doom this project. As we've found out over the past decade, not following the I-5 right of way has been a real mistake. Land acquisition has proven way costlier and taken much longer than expected, as many of the landowners are hostile to the project, and don't want HSR. The number of utility and road modifications has been staggering, as every little country road that intersects with the proposed route has to be dealt with. We're seeing elaborate pergolas and other ridiculous, expensive accommodations being made to appease otherwise hostile interests in the CV. Following the 5's ROW would have made these obstacles considerably less difficult.

So it's not just an issue of 12 additional minutes, or the billions of extra dollars required to reach the eastern side of the CV rather than the more direct route that the 5 takes. And, as I've said before, people in the CV would still have greatly benefitted from an I-5 alignment. Take a 30-40 minute ride (or less for Bakersfield, for example) to the HSR station, and you're in downtown SF or LA in a couple hours. Seems like a pretty nice benefit to those people who currently have to drive the entire distance to reach either of the big cities. Why was it so important to serve the downtown areas of Fresno and Bakersfield? It's a misnomer to think of inclusion of the CV as an either or. It would have still been served by the other, more direct route.

The latest goal for the project is an operational HSR line between Merced and Bakersfield by 2030. Of that stretch, only 119 of the 171 miles is even currently approved for construction. And this is the 'easy' part of the HSR route. Not the complicated tunneling and urban construction of the parts near SF and LA. Some skepticism and reflection on how we got where we are is warranted, I think.

It's more time than that but I don't know the exact amount, since the trains won't be able to travel at full speed in the long tunnel to Palmdale or the climb and short tunnels between Bakersfield and Tehachapi. But since we never had a full study of the Grapevine route, we really can't compare apples to apples. We're comparing a known - what is being built - to an unknown.

The two things that percolate behind the scenes and fuel the animosity of the LA Times, etc., are the threat Las Vegas and its low taxes and cost of living pose to Los Angeles, and then the fact that San Jose is going to get much faster and more voluminous service to SoCal than San Francisco.

So the big winners from the Palmdale/Central Valley routing are San Jose and Las Vegas.

The original Grapevine/Altamont routing would have shut the door on Las Vegas and offered spur service to San Jose instead of its prominent position on the mainline, equal to LA Union.

San Jose is going to be 40 minutes closer to LA than San Francisco and will have many more southbound trains per hour versus SF's 4. It's also going to be the easiest place for Central Valley people to commute (again, 40 minutes closer than SF). It's also going to have a BART connection, so it's really poised to experience a boost in importance.

This is exactly my thinking as well

Me, I would drop SFO; it already has a direct BART connection. SF straight to SJ on HSR makes more sense to me. But otherwise, I agree with the rest, including an express line that skips Fresno, Bakersfield and Palmdale.

Is there room on the Peninsula line for more tracks? Are they going to just be using the two existing commuter tracks?

San Francisco is the only U.S. city west of Chicago that has a traditional, centralized transit-oriented layout. That's the typology where HSR works. LA probably works as a function of size, but not really day-to-day functionality.

If this system is really going to be run as a Silicon Valley-LA corridor, it's even sillier. SV is centerless. They probably should have started by digging a tunnel in SF. SF, even moreso than LA, is the ridership prize.

I remember reading that they could electrify and run 150 MPH trains along existing routes for about 10% the cost, and only lose an hour off the trip, still competing with airlines. That would probably be the smarter project. Or if you're gonna spend like there's no tomorrow, bring in the Japanese and tunnel the whole route a la the u/c Tokyo-Osaka maglev.

The HSR travel time between San Jose and San Francisco is going to be 40 minutes???

Where did you read that? Did they leave out the fact that there is no existing passenger rail between the Central Valley and Los Angeles? Or that the massive fleet of freight trains have priority on all existing intrastate railroads, including the circuitous coastal route?

Doesn't current express service (max. 79 mph) already make the SF-SJ run in 40 minutes?

Per the simulation data that was released a few years ago, SF->SJ accounts for 29 minutes of the SF->LA express train. A train that stops at Millbrae and SJ would be closer to 40, but still doesn't seem like it would take quite that long.

The train speed will top out at 110 MPH on that segment, but will be slower in some sections.

And that'll probably be increased slightly to 125 mph once all the grade crossings are eliminated. But while CAHSR will help pay for it, that's not its responsibility and will fall on the train authorities in the general area.