In the late 1800s, it took railroad companies six years to lay 1,907 miles of track for what was to become the Transcontinental Railroad (or as Barack Obama calls it, the Intercontinental Railroad).
Building that railroad line required tunneling through mountains — at one foot a day — building bridges — including one that spanned 700 feet — and doing all the work almost entirely by hand.
As best, it will now take seven years for California to lay 119 miles of track — on relatively flat ground in the middle of nowhere.
That news came from a contract revision that the Obama administration approved late last week. Instead of finishing the first leg of what is supposed to be a High-Speed Rail service from San Francisco to San Diego by 2018, the new deadline is 2022, which will be seven years after the January 2015 groundbreaking.
Even when completed, the first leg will only run from Madera (population 63,105) down to Shafter, a small town north of Bakersfield. Not exactly a heavy transportation corridor.
That stretch, by the way, was picked because it was deemed the most “shovel ready” when the Obama administration was passing out stimulus funds. But even now, the state’s High Speed Rail Authority hasn’t put down any tracks, and has bought up less than half the land it needs in the Central Valley, according to Politico.
A few months ago, California revised its plans, pushing back the completion date for the first leg of the rail line — which will run north to San Jose — off to 2025. But if it can’t even get a track built in the middle of the desert in seven years, does anyone honestly believe it can finish the remaining 120 or so miles — through much less forgiving terrain — in three?
And these delays only add to costs, the Los Angeles Times notes, because they “have forced contractors to leave equipment idle, which is likely to result in multimillion-dollar claims of losses. Some outside construction experts are projecting the first 29 miles of construction alone could be as much as $400 million over budget.”
Keep in mind that the original plan had 800 miles of high-speed rail up and running by 2020.
Worse, unlike the Transcontinental Railroad, even if California does manage to bring this massively expensive boondoggle over the finish line, it’s unlikely that anyone will want to use it.