Category Archives: Transportation

The Great California Train Robbery is moving into full gear after nine foreign bidders responded with “expressions of interest” in building a fleet of electric trains for a proposed high-speed rail system. Perhaps best for California politicians is that there are no major U.S. manufacturer’s interested. That means Governor Brown and his Legislator allies will need to go on junkets to such exotic locations as China, France, Saudi Arabia, Germany, Italy, South Korea and Canada with their new best friends.

In its 2014 “high speed rail” (HSR) business plan, the California rail authority estimated it will spend $889 million to buy the 95 vehicles for its “initial operating segment” from Merced to Burbank, now planned to start carrying passengers by 2022. When the entire Phase 1 of the statewide system is expected to be built out from downtown San Francisco to downtown Los Angeles and Anaheim in 2028, capital spending for vehicles will leap to about $3.3 billion.

There are currently just 1,300 “high speed rail” (HSR) trains in Europe and Asia that travel at speeds of 186 mph or faster. From a financial standpoint, only two HSR lines in the world are profitable: Paris-Lyon in France and Tokyo-Osaka in Japan. A third line, Hakata-Osaka in Japan, breaks even. The others are all big time losers.

Amtrak USA has lost money every year of its existence and has run up total operating and capital losses of over $40 billion. During the 2000s, Amtrak averaged annual losses in excess of $1 billion. But during the financial crisis, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 pumped an additional $1.3 billion of the $8 billion in high-speed rail grants into Amtrak. In 2010, Amtrak got another slurp at the federal trough with an expanded $1.563 billion in operating subsidies and capital service grants.

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