Checking In On California High Speed Rail

A California high speed rail project connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco was originally proposed in 1996. By 2008, the project was put to voters in Proposition 1A, with the full project intended to be completed in 2020. It has successively fallen short of all its goals, and by February 2019, Governor Newsom announced the project would be cut back to a segment between Madera and Bakersfield, 119 miles. Newsom implied that it would never be completed between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Construction on this limited section began in 2019. I've checked in on progress now and then on trips up the San Joaquin Valley, but there's actually not much to see. The first photo below is progress on a jumpover where the high speed line crosses over the BNSF at Shafter, just north of Bakersfield. I took all these photos in May 2022.

Here is another jumpover near Wasco, a little farther north.

These are pillars to hold up the largest viaduct on the current project, 6000 feet long, passing over highways and the San Joaquin Valley Railroad in Hanford.

A discussion thread on the Altamont Press board has recently pointed out that although construction of roadbed and bridges is under way, the US Department of Transportation is so far only prepared to fund track, signals, and "maybe" electrification on the current 119 mile Bakersfield-Madera segment. Funding of any further segments on the whole route is currently unlikely, and in fact the precise route either north to San Francisco or south to Los Angeles has never been established in any case.

But even if track is laid on the 119-mile segment, there won't be any trains to run on it. The discussion raised the possibility that existing California Department of Transportation equipment with F59PHIs, Siemens Chargers, and bi-level California cars might be used and rerouted onto the high speed infrastructure off the BNSF line currently used, but these are designed for a maximulm speed of 125 mph, not the 200+ mph originally intended for the project.

An additional problem is the jumpovers currently being built for the line, two of which are illustrated above. These have relatively steep grades leading up to them, even though the San Joaquin Valley is largely flat. Pure high speed trains like those in Europe can handle this type of grade by having powered trucks under the coaches, which results in very high power to maintain speed over these hills. High speed lines aren't designed for diesel-hauled conventional coaches.

There may even be serious questions over whether the high speed rail bridges were designed to carry the weight of a loco like a Siemens Charger, which is 130 tons. Thus it's entirely possible that the billions spent on this project can't even be repurposed for "higher speed" rail in the 125 mph range.