Work is set to begin Monday on a $12 billion high-speed passenger rail line between Las Vegas and the Los Angeles area, with officials projecting millions of ticket-buyers will be boarding trains by 2028.
Brightline West, whose sister company already operates a fast train between Miami and Orlando in Florida, aims to lay 218 miles (351 kilometers) of new track between a terminal to be built just south of the Las Vegas Strip and another new facility in Rancho Cucamonga, California. Almost the full distance is to be built in the median of Interstate 15, with a station stop in San Bernardino County’s Victorville area.
In a statement, Brightline Holdings founder and Chairperson Wes Edens called the moment “the foundation for a new industry.”
Brightline aims to link other U.S. cities that are too near to each other for flying between them to make sense and too far for people to drive the distance, Edens said.
Stopping in Rancho Cucamonga? Awesome. Now instead of driving 4 hours to Vegas from the West side of LA, I can drive an hour to Rancho Cucamonga, find parking, wait for the train, sit on a train for 1.5 hours (total guess assuming 150mph), then take a shuttle or taxi or uber to the hotels.
This will be great for people on the East side of LA who don’t want to drive 3 hours or drive 1.5 hours to LAX (with traffic), but stopping in downtown LA would have allowed me to get on the Metro to downtown and transfer to the Vegas line. I’ve been wanting high speed rail to Vegas from LA for decades, but stopping so far from downtown sucks for 75% of the city.
At least it’ll take tons of cars off the road for those common use cases.
Yeah, it would be great for it to go into LA itself. I hate it when transport hubs are on the edge of the city.
I’m not familiar with LA, but it looks like there’s existing rail service to Rancho Cucamonga? Hopefully the terminal is also a station for one of those services so that changing is easy (though really I’d want them to just continue on that track right into LA).
Yeah, that’s not really LA. Optimally, the train should go to Union Station. Seems to make the most sense to end there.
Phase 2?
They’re planning timed transfers with metrolink. Something like arriving 20 minutes before the brightline departs IIRC. Seemed like a bigger gap than I’d like but not too terrible.
Hell yeah, high speed rail anywhere in this nation is worth celebrating. Hopefully this drives some other areas of the nation to look into building links like this between cities. I’ve long dreamt of a KC-STL-CHI link that could be further benefited by having links throughout the Great Lakes with Chicago serving as a hub to connect the likes of Detroit and the Twin Cities to the heartland with high speed rail
I would love to be able to do that, hell I could take the damn train for work then.
When we got married we had our wedding in Vegas because it was the cheapest place for everyone to fly to. I assume casinos somehow help subsidize airfare. If they subsidize rail to increase profits and Vegas becomes the western hub of high speed rail, I’m ok with that.
I’d love to see them do Vegas to Flagstaff to Phoenix to Tucson next. I’d probably take a lot more weekend trips to Vegas if it was fast (200mph+) and cheap and keeps me away from TSA.
Obligatory City Nerd video analyzing the utility of the rail line
The TGV in France reportedly costs 25 million per kilometre, which I thought sounded ridiculously expensive
This is costing 36 million per kilometre!
Wonder who’s pocketing the extra?
