“They used to tell me I was building a dream, and so I followed the mob.” Thus began the song that became the anthem of the Great Depression. It was about an unemployed construction worker and WWI veteran named Al, who recalled: “Once I built a railroad, made it run, made it race against time.” He was given life by Yip Harburg’s words in 1932, and his plaintive plea started as “Brother, can you spare a dime?” and ended as “Buddy, can you spare a dime?” Could Al, who received so little in return for his labor and service have more in common with the California High-Speed Rail (CAHSR) project than appears at first glance? In this column, I’ll look at some alternatives that CAHSR’s proponents did not pursue, alternatives that might have changed the history and outcome of the project.
There has been a lot of talk lately about the future of the project. Executive Editor Marybeth Luczak reported on July 18 that the POTUS 47 Administration is clawing back the money that had previously been granted for the new railroad, much as it also managed to convince Congress to rescind the grants that had been authorized for noncommercial TV and radio, and as POTUS 45 (the same person, in case you forgot) had done to the same California rail project in 2019. This is still a developing story and appeals and/or litigation appear likely. The FRA report that started the process noted nine key reasons why the agency does not expect CASHR to complete the segment between Merced and Bakersfield by the end of 2033. Luczak also reported that CAHSR is fighting back, and her report included statements form CASHR management and Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Although the right-of-way is flat enough to accommodate Class 9 track (rated for 200 mph), the project itself has faced ups and downs that more closely resemble a roller coaster. It appeared dead in 2019, recovered to a “limited clear” indication during the Biden years, and is now slated to lose its federal grant again. We still don’t know what the future will hold. Will California or some other entity find the money to fill the gap? Will politics change enough during the next few years to restore the project? Will it be reduced in scope so there will still be a new railroad where the HSR line had been planned? Could a P3 (public-private partnership) work? I don’t know, but let’s see how it got to where it is today.
Building a Dream?
One person in particular had a dream and was in a position to make the pitch to have that dream built, or at least to get construction started. He was Rod Diridon, for whom the train station in San José is named. He wanted to build a railroad that would truly “race against time” and on a much grander scale. The railroad he envisioned would allow trains to zoom between Los Angeles and San Francisco in as little as 2 hours and 40 minutes, and charge sufficiently low fares to compete effectively with airlines for speed and get travelers between Northern and Southern California onto trains and off the highways.
Slightly more than 20 years ago, I caught Diridon’s pitch at two national conferences. One was sponsored by the American Public Transportation Association (APTA), and the other by the National Association of Railroad Passengers (NARP), now RPA. The idea sounded great, but personally, I was skeptical. I did not see how California, with whatever help the State could have gotten from elsewhere, could have come up with the money to complete such an ambitious and costly project. I also believed, and still do, that upgrading the existing railroads (the Coast Line, which hosts Amtrak’s Coast Starlight and some corridor-length trains, and the San Joaquin Line, which runs in the Central Valley, but only as far as Bakersfield, and then buses go the rest of the way to L.A.) to “high-performance rail” standards (110 mph, or even 125) would be significantly less expensive, making that option more cost-effective than shooting for true HSR. It seemed that not many others shared my skepticism at the time.
To be sure, Rod Diridon has had an illustrious career in politics and management, along with other civic positions and some time on the railroad. I have no doubt that he believed in his vision and had the credibility to persuade others to believe in it, too. He has done many good things, and I was not disrespecting him by being skeptical in this case. My concern was that his predictions appeared overly optimistic, given the uncertainties and delays that accompany any project, especially a mega-project.
Conventional Alternatives?
As things turned out, Diridon’s predictions were overly optimistic. Sadly, his hopes for a high-speed line between San Francisco and Los Angeles, with branches to Sacramento and Anaheim (in Orange County, the home of Disneyland) melted into a sad reality of politics, delays and escalating costs that all seemed to combine to push the project further into the future, in terms of both money and a date for service to start. Today, there is construction in the Central Valley, with the hope that the railroad will connect Merced and Bakersfield by the end of 2033, but the FRA does not believe that. As for Los Angeles, building a true HSR line south of Bakersfield will take even longer. So will getting to the Bay Area, even though electrifying Caltrain, a regional rail line between San Francisco and San José with a few diesel shuttle trains further south to Gilroy for commuters, came with the HSR project. According to Caltrain, the electrification has reduced running time and increased ridership.
I don’t have the numbers on the cost of upgrading the Coast Line and San Joaquin Line to high-performance rail standards, including the cost of constructing a relatively fast railroad between Bakersfield and Los Angeles that would not meet FRA Class 9 standards but would still run fast enough to meet the “high-performance” standard. There are cost estimators who could come up with such numbers, but I also know that, the higher the speed, the steeper the slope (or the slopes of increments of the curve getting steeper) of the line on a graph depicting marginal increase in cost relative to the marginal increase in top speed.
Today’s Acela trains between Washington, D.C. and Boston on Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor (NEC) travel 457 miles in 6:45 (405 minutes), for an average speed of slightly less than 68 mph. According to historic Southern Pacific schedules for both lines between Los Angeles and San Francisco, the Coast Line is 470 miles long, while the San Joaquin Line is 482 miles long, similar to the length of the line used today on the historic Santa Fe (now BNSF) route, which runs parallel to it. If a railroad could be built and operated on lines of that length and at the average speed of the Acela trains, it would take about seven hours for a trip between L.A. Union Station and the Caltrain station in San Francisco. That time would be competitive with an automobile trip on the highway from end to end (or somewhat faster) and not much longer than it would take by air, considering the amount of time needed to travel to and from the airports on transit and required airport waiting time at the airport itself.
Getting to L.A.
Today, the only through train between Los Angeles and the Bay Area (Emeryville and Oakland in the East Bay, not San Francisco itself) is the Coast Starlight, which takes about 11 hours for the trip. It’s interesting and it’s scenic, but it’s also an all-day ride. The last time an overnight train ran between the two cities was the SP’s Lark, which ran for the last time in 1968. Amtrak’s Spirit of California ran on a 13-hour schedule between Los Angeles and Sacramento through the East Bay for 23 months during the early 1980s. There has never been an overnight train on the route since, although a “sleeper bus” that looked more like a tractor trailer than a bus, with its “sleeping pods,” ran briefly about ten years ago.
The lack of multiple (or even two) frequencies between California’s largest metropolitan areas says a lot about non-automobile mobility (or lack of same) in the Golden State. The situation is even worse on the San Joaquin route. There are no trains south of Bakersfield, only buses that take 2:20 to get to the City of Angels, three hours with a suburban stop, and that’s on top of the transfer time at Bakersfield, which can take up to an additional 30 minutes.
Is the delay necessary? Maybe not. Is it necessary to terminate all trains at Bakersfield to avoid the Tehachapi Pass and other mountains south of there? Again, maybe not. Few of us can remember riding on the historic SP San Joaquin route. Like many other trains, it rolled into history on April 30, 1971. Due to a trackwork project in April 2011, a version of the “San Joaquin Daylight” lived again for three days, running as a detoured Amtrak Train 11 over the old SP route. I was aboard one of those days as part of an itinerary that required considerable effort and careful planning. The track was in good condition, and the train ran well. Significantly, even though the train had operated on a foreign railroad all day, it reached L.A. Union Station only about 30 minutes past the advertised arrival time for its regular route.
An argument that has been used to justify the lack of passenger trains between Los Angeles and Bakersfield is that the Tehachapi Pass route is too slow. A look at the 1971 SP timetable renders that argument questionable, though. In its last days, it took the train approximately 2:30 to run between Lancaster and Bakersfield (92 miles) and about the same time to run between Lancaster and Los Angeles (77 miles). Today’s Metrolink Antelope Valley trains on the southern “half” of that line run somewhat faster: 2:09 inbound and 2:12 or 2:13 outbound, making all Metrolink local stops. This raises the question of whether some modest improvements could speed up service on the Tehachapi Pass portion of the line, so that overall travel time to and from Northern California would equal, or at least come close to, the current time with the relatively long bus ride and the transfer time at Bakersfield.
Our discussion of conventional alternatives has highlighted other ways to provide train service between California’s two hubs, even if the HSR project is not completed. At this point we don’t know, but it also does not make sense to act on a “one or the other” attitude. HSR and conventional trains serve different stops and different constituencies. One question that has not been considered, and I can’t answer it here, is what will happen to the current conventional service in the Central Valley if and when the high-speed trains start running. Time will tell, but that will not happen soon.
Fallacy of “Sunk Cost” in California?
It is a common, but mistaken, strategy to build the least-expensive segment of a project until the original allocation is all spent. The argument then goes that it would be wasteful not to continue construction, because the sunk costs would be wasted. Almost everyone who has a business degree or significant management training knows that the preferred method of decision-making is to ignore sunk costs and to look only at projected future costs and benefits when making decisions. The analogy to gambling is not to be like the unlucky gamblers who keep spending money at the table to get back the money they have already lost. Even today, the literature contains articles about how improper thinking about sunk costs can cause errors that range from lost profits to the U.S. getting into situations like the Iraq War. Could that be part of the problem that California’s HSR managers are facing today?
Longtime Chicago advocate and journalist F. K. Plous has been suggesting for years that, rather than build a new line in the flat Central Valley, parallel to the line that now hosts several conventional trains each day in both directions, it would have made more sense to build the first segment between Los Angeles and Bakersfield. His argument makes sense. A rail line through the mountains that would accommodate passenger trains at HSR speeds would create an asset with independent utility that could replace an unpleasant and time-consuming bus ride and transfer with a one-seat ride to Bakersfield and points north. He told Railway Age than a sufficiently fast train could bring Bakersfield within commuting distance of Los Angeles, at least based on the time required to get there. During overnight hours when passenger trains are not running, it could be used for fast freight, which would bring in some additional revenue. There is no reason why such a plan would not work for a conventional rail line, too, preferably one that would run at “high-performance” speeds. Trains running at such speeds might not deliver all the benefits of true HSR, but the line would cost less and still deliver a significant improvement over having to take a bus part of the way, complete with transfers.
I can’t resolve these issues here, because I don’t have the time and information to do that at this time. Still, I can raise issues that the managers and politicians who pushed for HSR might have missed by omitting a somewhat slower alternative of building a more-affordable project.
I can also hope that, somehow, the decision-makers in California come up with a viable plan to build a railroad that can provide frequent service between the state’s two transportation hubs, with their strong networks of supporting transit and their catchment areas where millions of people live. The recent bouts of “on again” and “off again” for federal funding have not been good for California, its residents or visitors to the state. (That never occurred in France with the TGV, Germany with the ICE, China with its massive HSR network, etc.) A line that can host trains that take people to their destinations in a quick, smooth and auto-free manner would suit everybody’s needs, especially if California can afford to build it without help from the feds or work out a deal with host railroads.
It would be especially sad if the folks promoting the new railroad for California end up like Al in the song, left without the result of his labors and begging for funds. Still, they need to come up with some innovative ideas that will get a useful railroad built and running within a reasonable number of years, true HSR or not. No one knows what will happen, but I, through Railway Age, will keep an eye on the story and keep hoping to ride on a line someday that provides frequent trips between California’s regions.
