Brightline's planned rail line from Las Vegas to Los Angeles could be the first true high-speed train in the US, with speeds in excess of 185 mph.
Brightline
smallix decades after Japan debuted shinkansen bullet trains, high-speed rail lines connect major cities in Europe, South Korea, Taiwan, and especially China, which has an extensive system of 26,000 miles. Other regions are also embracing it: trains race across Morocco, the Saudi Arabian desert, and a high-speed line spanning the Indonesian island of Java opens in June. The one major outlier? The United States, where travelers are stuck on cramped, crowded planes and congested highways as fast, futuristic trains race through country after country.
But not for much longer.
The bipartisan Infrastructure Act of 2021 provided billions of dollars for Amtrak to make its Northeast Corridor Acela trains run at speeds of up to 160 miles per hour this year between Boston, New York and Washington. But it also earmarked $12 billion for other projects, some targeting even faster trains. Funding decisions for two of them, California's high-speed rail system and Brightline West's Las Vegas-to-Los Angeles train, are coming soon, according to Mitch Landrieu, President Joe Biden's senior infrastructure adviser.
“Outside the Northeast Corridor, there are opportunities that exist right now. I'm not going to talk about any of the specific proposals that are out there, but suffice it to say that the president wants to move quickly,” Landrieu, a former mayor of New Orleans, said at the high-speed rail conference in Washington this month. “My expectation, and it's just an expectation, is that these decisions will be made [Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg] before the end of summer. Maybe before the end of the third or fourth quarter.”
The rise of the automobile, the creation of a national highway system, and access to air travel in the post-World War II era killed a passenger rail industry that had flourished for a century in the U.S., but a growing number of states and territories beyond California and the Northeast, where Amtrak is used the most, are mapping future high-speed lines to facilitate travel between major cities up to 300 miles apart, including Texas, the Pacific Northwest and Georgia. For the first time, there's a federal grant to help with that, along with a decades-old loan program originally created to upgrade freight lines that could provide an additional $30 billion.
Amtrak's next-generation Acela trains built by Alstom will run at speeds of up to 160 mph.
Amtrak
California is seeking $2.83 billion in Infrastructure Act grants, while Brightline, created by private equity billionaire Wes Edens, applied for $3.75 billion last month. The Golden State project, years under construction in the Central Valley, will someday connect San Francisco to Los Angeles with 200 mph trains if it can fully finance its more than $100 billion construction cost . Brightline estimates that public funds will cover about a third of Southwest's $12 billion, with the rest coming from private investors.
Proposed railroads elsewhere in the country, such as a Portland-Seattle-Vancouver line and a Dallas-Fort Worth-Houston high-speed train, are in earlier stages of development and are likely seeking federal grants to expedite engineering and design rather than construction. .
California, Brightline trains
The California project, which is taking longer and costing more than expected when state voters approved a $10 billion bond to fund it in 2008, is the nation's most ambitious but won't open until a decade at the earliest of 2030. Brightline believes it can build the 218-mile route in four years. It wants to break ground this year and start running 186 mph electric trains from suburban Los Angeles to Las Vegas in 2028. That positions it as a catalyst for US high-speed rail — if all goes according to plan. plan.
“There are days when we feel the weight of the world on our backs,” said CEO Mike Reininger. “We are talking about billions of dollars and this is a private investment. This is money entrusted to us by others to put to work and get back. So there are clear performance pressures.”
High-speed rail lines are proposed for California, Nevada, Texas, Georgia and the Pacific Northwest and are already under construction in California's Central Valley.
American Association of High Speed Rail
Brightline, which operates a private passenger railroad in south Florida and will expand service from Miami to Orlando this summer with trains running up to 125 miles per hour, estimates it will be able to build a mile of track a day through Nevada and California. desert. Almost all of it will be in the median between the lanes of US Interstate 15 and run on the ground, not on elevated viaducts like much of California's system. The company plans to raise more than $8 billion from private investors, assuming it receives its intended $3.75 billion grant. But what if he doesn't?
“We don't want to entertain those possibilities today,” Reininger said.
Funding is also a major concern for California. It has received $3.5 billion from the Department of Transportation to help build the Central Valley portion of its system, on top of the $10 billion originally raised for the project. The California High Speed Rail Authority also receives about $1 billion a year from the state's greenhouse gas cap-and-trade program. His request for infrastructure grants will help pay for work on the 119-mile stretch under construction, but the biggest challenge is where the money will come from to expand the system to more than 500 miles, including San Francisco and Los Angeles .
So far, state funds have paid 85 percent of the initial cost, with federal dollars covering the remaining 15 percent, Kelly said. “And 85-15 in favor of the state is not the usual recipe for advancing a project of this magnitude.”
California believes at least 32 million riders will eventually ride the trains between the Southern California and San Francisco Bay areas, but it's uncertain exactly when that will happen because of its funding dilemma.
“No major project of this magnitude succeeds without a strong federal partner,” said Brian Kelly, California project CEO. “It's true of the interstate highway system. It applies to major airport improvements and it applies to all kinds of larger projects.”
California's high-speed rail system is under construction in the Central Valley, but it needs tens of billions of dollars to connect to San Francisco and Los Angeles.
California High Speed Rail Authority
Both California and Brightline plan to power their trains with massive amounts of solar, wind and other forms of renewable electricity, making them much cleaner than flying or driving. Investor Edens has even boasted that its Brightline West project will be the greenest high-speed line in the world. That's likely to be key to the bonds the company will sell to people in the market for so-called environmental, social and governance-oriented, or ESG, investing, Edens said. Forbes recently.
“No major project of this magnitude succeeds without a strong federal partner.”
Additional Financing Options
When the $12 billion from the infrastructure bill runs out, there's another source of funding that future US bullet trains could tap into. The Railroad Rehabilitation & Improvement Financing (RRIF) program, created in 1998 and updated in 2008, offers 35-year low-cost loans of up to $3.5 billion for specialized programs for railroad projects of all types. But it has been largely underutilized, and of the original $35 billion loan approval for the program, $30 billion remains available, according to the Federal Railroad Administration.
“Absolutely, RRIF is an option for funding,” said Amit Bose, administrator of the Federal Railroad Administration. Forbes. It has not been widely used until this point due to a rigorous application process that requires detailed economic analysis and other upfront costs. “Entities like Brightline or the California High Speed Rail Authority are sophisticated applicants and should be able to maneuver through this process.”
And yet, neither has applied for RRIF funds. “This may be a longer-term option, but right now our priority is grant applications,” said Melissa Figueroa, a spokeswoman for the California program. Brightline doesn't plan to use the RIFF option at this time and believes the Department of Transportation's Private Activity Bond program, a low-cost financing tool for infrastructure projects that don't have to be rail-related, better aligns with its plans, said the representative Ben Porritt.
“We have had success with private activity bonds and we intend to use them as a debt vehicle,” he said. For example, Brightline financed much of its Florida railroad with private activity bonds and was preparing to build its West Coast line with them in 2020, when the Covid pandemic halted its plans for three years.
Faster Acela trains and upgraded tracks and bridges will help Amtrak's most profitable route attract even more riders, but Brightline trains through the desert could finally help a much larger number of American travelers understand why bullet trains they have become indispensable in so much of the world and they want more of them at home.
“At the end of the day, at some point hopefully in the not-too-distant future in the United States of America, we're not only starting to reach other countries, we're going to go beyond that,” Landrieu said. “If you want to do this, we have to put the money where it belongs.”
