The TRAINS Newswire for Wednesday, January 8, 2025, showed a California diagram of massive routes in the state for High Speed Rail (HSR) and Electrication in 2050. It peculiarly showed the Victorville to Palmdale route in the High Desert! That route lost an environmental lawsuit not long ago. It is wondered what will change that will allow the route to be utilized by 2050.
Actually, I wonder if California will ever be able to complete any HSR projects, so far they havenât been that successful! 
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Those that follow the California HSR program anymore are calling it a bigger waste of taxpayer money than most pentagon programs. 25 years ago it was supposed to cost what 10 billion dollars. Now itâs going on well over 100 billion dollars and still has yet to even lay one mile of new track. Except for the BART area electrifying of their lineâs there nothing but wasted money.
I donât even follow the California HSR program all that closely, but just the news clips I see occasionally clearly demonstrate the massive waste of money itâs been. I see no reason to believe itâll get better with age.
The bad part about Californiaâs handling of this is it discourages any other state from attempting to plan for HSR.
Hopefully Brightline West between LA and LV will fix that. Governments canât innovate. They can run existing things reasonably well but creating something, not. All HSRs should be privately built turn key. Then let the politicians run them.
What has been lacking since the original initiative is advice from people with experience in large construction railroad construction projects. An example: âYouâre planning to place a route through a developed area? Have you considered issues with underground utilities??â Another example: âWhat about horizontal and vertical curves consistent with 220 MPH operation when crossing mountain ranges?â
We have to part company here, Iâd never let the politicians run them! 
The principal problem with CAHSR, from its origins right through to now â and I say this as a consultant â is too many consultants, usually of the wrong kind.
It would not take more than a few months of engineering, surveying, and modeling to decide on optimal routes for HSR, and only a little more to plan their staged construction (for example to provide high speed in the early sections that, ridiculously, need it little if at all). That would also have permitted all the political âoptimizationâ (for example, the decision not to have true HSR to San Francisco at all, or even separated from commute traffic) to be made and explained.
The requirements for HSR track at 300 km/h had been largely established by the time I was in college, in the late '70s â that was the first place I saw eighth-order differential equations used in practice. I have to admit â if pushed â that this standard was perfectly adequate for most of what California actually intended building. The requirements for 350 km/h were well-known in Europe by the time a properly-optimized CAHSR design process would have needed detail-design information. I have yet to see a document that actually mentions the route segments and mileage that actually have to be buiilt for cost-effective 220mph operation; the politicized route in much of the Central Valley has the same issue as the south end of the NEC that there are too many political stops to allow cost-effective acceleration and deceleration to the full designed equipment speed.
The elephant in the room in the first Obama administration is how this system will ever be operated to pay its way from âfarebox receiptsâ â including the capital costs of construction and maintenance.
Victorville to Palmdale is a line that would benefit from punctuated electrification (e.g. with dual-mode lite and batteryhhybrid consists) long before any practical âelectrificationâ mandate were to take effect. What I expect to see is relatively short sections of constant-tension cat supplied as the equivalent of rolling Supercharger stations for the on-board battery enablement, and possibly for wayside power recovery. All these sections are immediately serviceable for âfull electrificationâ when that is prioritized (when what freezes over, I hear Earnestine sayâŚ) but allow snapping on upgrades, safer dynamic on downgrades, and boosted acceleration where appropriate, on a scale that shouldnât interfere dramatically with automotive electrificationâŚ
Any state that bases a decision about HSR on the California experience should stay out of HSR if only because it demonstrates that theyâre a hopeless as California. California is the poster child for how to set up an HSR project for failure. The dominance of environmentalism alone was a guarantee of abject failure, let alone the inevitable political squabbling and NIMBY interference. It is only the sheer arrogance of California that the project hasnât been canceled. I have no doubt those in CA still pushing this HSR boondoggle see themselves as the HSR âchosen peopleâ who must show the rest of the country the path that will free them from those pollution belching internal combustion engine vehicles.
Brightline, in the other hand, has proven HSR can be done in a reasonable time frame for a reasonable budget, so long as government isnât in control.
I lived in the San Fernando Valley in southern California from 1952 to1995 when I moved my family to Virginia do to the 7.3 & 7.6 earth Quakes that hit the San Fernando valley January 95. Two week later their was a vote of No Confidence in Sacramento state capitol. the Main objection of high speed trains is itâs EARTH QUAKE country and they just canât get the funding, too many people feel is to dangerous and think its a big waist of money close to 1 Billion U.S. Dollars now.
So in 2050 if there are hover trains by then we may see high speed trains in California.
Dan
Maglev trains are far more susceptible to earthquake trouble than conventional HSR, especially if (as is the case for most of the existing installed or proposed systems) an extensive percent of their track miilieage is in tunnels or deep cuts.
While there is a magnetic gap between track and train, even slight geological misalignment of the track structure, even over thousands of feed, can result in dramatic damaging contact that will likely decelerate the train at a rate dangerous to unsecured riders. And the fun involved in line âfine tuning to gradeâ for these trains is much greater and more interesting than for normal LGV-type construction. (See the successful slab track design DOT and FRA tested, and think about how it would be lined, surfaced, etc.).
Earthquakes are occasional events, the real challenge is that many fault lines in California are slipping almost continuously. Trying to keep a Maglev âtrackâ in line could be a difficult job.
Retirement for me was working at an OEM company. We never worried much about EU or EPA requirements, it was always CARB. We always laughed about quality of air CONTROL at the California/Oregon boarder.
Now that I think about it (in reverse of above slam at CA) . The concern for international air quality and inequity of same, i.e. China, India compared to the USA and rest of the world. endmrw0110252028
It should be noted that Japan, first in the world with HSR is earthquake country. Thatâs not the problem. Politics and graft are the primary problems.
Note that I was specifically referring to Maglev, not HSR. I was also referring to movements of fault lines that are not a result of earthquakes.
Having said that, HSR on ballasted track will have much less of a problem than maglev guideways.
No argument from that politics and graft are problems.
Hereâs how extreme CARB is in their regulations in the OTR industry to give you an idea of what they think. A truck thatâs 100 percent legal to run into the rest of the nation canât even be registered in California unless itâs less than a decade old and has the most current EPA emission reduction equipment on it.
Then we have their anti idling regulation. We all know that metal heats up in the sunlight and a child in a car left alone can die. Well CARB expects OTR drivers to sleep in metal boxes for up to 10 hours with only 5 minutes an hour of air conditioning in the summer. Yet if your carrying a pet like a dog or cat that regulation doesnât matter as the animal has more right to be comfortable than the person in charge of 40 tons of vehicle.
California orders ridiculous mandates âbecause they canâ â theyâve done it with trailer aero of dubious effectiveness already. I think their âargumentâ is similar to that at NHTSA with Federal regulations: if you want to conduct trucking in California, youâll keep your trucks new, and your suite of wach âpollution abatementâ controls current, and just charge more, more, more to cover all the costs. Now, were you to see California regulating the much higher charges for moves originating in, destined for, or crossing California⌠you might see less eagerness for profit by truckers â especially independents. But weâll just let the Californians find out about that after 2030.
Electric âpackageâ air conditioning has been a âthingâ for decades, and inexpensive hybrid power to run it âovernightâ just as you would for a RV is at least partially costed-down. While it might be fun to speculate whether California would authorize the current generation of âpropane 12V air conditionersâ coming out of China, I think the idea that a small genset engine running a rightsized package AC for cab and sleeper is vastly preferable to idling the main truck engijne, inefficiently and in a way that accelerates gunking up the antipollution scams, even if there are still carbon emissions involved. Many Eastern states have long since imposed 5-minute idling restrictions, and to my knowledge seriously enforced them.