A planned rail line connecting Nevada and Southern California will be “the greenest form of transportation in America”, according to the company leading the project.
Scheduled for completion later this decade, a planned high-speed rail line aims to halve travel times between Las Vegas and Los Angeles – and significantly reduce pollution caused by road traffic between the two U.S. cities.
Led by the private rail service company Brightline, the project is expected to cost around $12 billion, boosted by significant federal funding.
Notably, in April last year it was announced that construction of the line is to benefit from a $3 billion grant from the Federal Department of Transportation.
Known as Brightline West, the 218-mile rail route is to run between Las Vegas and Rancho Cucamonga, a city around 35 miles east of downtown L.A.
It will be “the first true high-speed passenger rail system in the nation”, says Brightline, which claims the service will be “the greenest form of transportation in America”.
An expected nine million passengers a year are to be carried on a fleet of “zero-emission, fully electric” trains capable of top speeds of around 200 mph.
@SiemensUSA is investing $60 million and creating 300 jobs to build @BrightlineWest trains, including union jobs under the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. pic.twitter.com/kodFSfEmiT
While it takes around four hours to drive between Las Vegas and L.A., Brightline pledges to get customers to their destination in just over two hours.
Currently, Brightline notes, more than 85% of the estimated 50 million annual trips between Las Vegas and L.A. are completed by car, on the I-5 interstate highway. Once Brightline West is in operation, the company says, more than 400,000 tons of emissions will be eliminated each year, by removing three million automobiles from the roads between Nevada and Southern California.
Aside from Brightline West’s flagship stations in Las Vegas and Rancho Cucamonga, the Nevada Department of Transportation (NDOT) explains, there will be additional Californian stops in Apple Valley and Hesperia.
Brightline, which says its mission is to take cars off the road for journeys that are “too short to fly and too long to drive”, already operates a rail system in Florida, running between Miami and Orlando.
Brightline West officially broke ground on the project in April last year, with the California Department of Transportation reporting that core drilling work is underway “in preparation of the coming construction”.
Speaking earlier this year, NDOT senior project manager Eric Scheetz said construction was “very close” to getting underway, as Brightline sought to tie up the final funding needed for the project.
“We’re watching all that, and literally stuff is changing by the minute,” Scheetz said in February, per the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “We’re hearing good responses from Brightline and that things are coming very close to signing on the dotted line.”
Brightline West was previously reported to be on pace to open in time for the next Summer Olympics, which are to be held in L.A. between July 14 and 30, 2028.
However, while Brightline maintains that the line will be ready to receive passengers by 2028, it now appears that the Games will come too soon: according to KTNV Las Vegas’s Jarah Wright, who cited documents issued by Brightline West officials, the service is now expected to launch in December 2028.
While Brightline West’s billion-dollar federal funding was approved under Joe Biden’s Democratic administration, it appears to have retained the support of the federal government under Republican President Donald Trump, who took office in January this year.
Although Trump’s transport secretary, Sean Duffy, has heavily criticized another planned high-speed rail line, which seeks to connect San Francisco and L.A., he has lauded the Brightline West project as “impressive”.
“Those are the projects that I think taxpayers are willing to invest in,” Duffy told a news conference in February, per Fox.
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