CNS –
California leaders are ready to lay high-speed rail tracks through the Central Valley, and on Monday they signaled where the tracks are headed: south toward Palmdale, to make connections into Las Vegas.
When they’ll arrive at the Transbay Terminal in downtown San Francisco remains uncertain.
The new map would plug California high-speed rail into a regional network with two other bullet train lines — the High Desert Corridor in Los Angeles, and the privately owned Brightline West route from Vegas to Rancho Cucamonga.
Officials began promoting the western desert network amid growing uncertainty for California’s bullet-train project , long a subject of derision for Republicans who now have control of Congress. Many, including Vivek Ramaswamy, an advisor to President Donald Trump, have decried the project for delays and skyrocketing costs. Funding for the original idea — 463 miles of track from Los Angeles to the Bay Area — has for years been in jeopardy.
Despite the challenges ahead, Gov. Gavin Newsom struck a sanguine tone as he planned to hammer a symbolic spike into the ground in Kern County Monday afternoon. The first segment, 22 miles from the border of Tulare and Kern counties to Poplar Avenue in Wasco, is the southernmost part of a section from Merced to Bakersfield. Passenger service could start as early as 2030, spokespeople for the governor’s office said.
“It wasn’t that long ago that you had leaders in the state of California talking about this project, (saying) why the hell are we doing it in the Central Valley? There’s just tumbleweeds in the Central Valley!” Newsom said, pushing back against critics during a news conference to celebrate the new railhead. The governor stood alongside other leaders on a gravel path lined with idle construction equipment and workers in mesh vests.
“I’ve never thought of this, fundamentally, as a project that’s just about rail,” Newsom continued. “It’s about economic development. It’s about creating a sense of place. It’s about upzoning around the rail. It’s about infrastructure.” He touted the jobs generated by the new rail system, the funding California had secured from President Joe Biden’s administration, and the role high-speed rail played in the electrification of Caltrain, a third of which was paid for with high-speed rail bonds.
A 2024 strategic state rail plan called for bullet trains to share track with Caltrain from Gilroy to San Francisco, if and when the northern branch gets built.
Delivering his own remarks at the news conference, High-Speed Rail Authority CEO Ian Choudri underscored the partnerships with Brightline West and High Desert Corridor. He said the three lines were laying a foundation to “revolutionize travel across the southwest region.”At a moment when funding and political will are both shaky, the plan to link three rail lines would allow Newsom to leverage the infrastructure California has built with investments that have already been made in other projects.
President-elect Donald Trump will take over the White House in two weeks, and Democrats have voiced concern about how he will handle existing federal grants for the rail system.
Tensions only heightened on Monday when Rep. Kevin Kiley, a Republican from Rocklin, introduced legislation to torpedo federal funding for what he called a “failed” high-speed rail project.
“California’s high-speed rail project has failed because of political incompetence, and there is no plausible scenario where the cost to federal or state taxpayers can be justified,” Kiley said in a news release announcing the bill.
Since its genesis in 1996 — the year California lawmakers created the High Speed Rail Authority to design plans for trains to zip between major job centers — high-speed rail presented a captivating vision for the future of transportation, even as it hit lawsuits, geological obstacles, turgid bureaucracy, construction delays and ballooning costs.
In his first State of the State address in 2019, Newsom pledged to focus on the Central Valley portion of high-speed rail, suggesting he would shrink down the map and scale back a dream of his predecessor, Jerry Brown. Following an uproar, Newsom walked his comments back, though a funding strategy for the full California rail line has yet to crystallize.