When we started keeping track of the ups and downs (mostly downs) of the proposed California high-speed rail that, if built, would run between San Diego and San Francisco in a couple of hours, twelve times each day in each diretion, we had no idea that we were sticking our little harpoon into a big whale. But foreseen or not, the doings of that high-speed railroad have now gone beyond the ridiculous — you just couldn’t make it up if you tried.
The March 31st issue of the Sacramento Bee brings the news that, faced with the growing anger of California voters who were snookered into approving a $9 billion bond issue for this railroad whose estimated cost jumped first to $43 billion, and then to $98.5 billion, the folks in Sacramento are retreating. Now we are told that the projected cost has been reduced by $30 billion. How? Our technical background is in rocket engineering, not railroads, but even so we don’t know how you can reduce the cost of a massive project like a railroad by nearly one-third and still come up with something like what was intended in the beginning. But here it is in black and white: Our Governor Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown has told reporters that, by golly, he spent “several hours” on the changes this week. There, that should do it. Dan Smith and David Siders, Gov. Jerry Brown to Change High-Speed Rail Plan, Lower Cost by $30 Billion, Sacramento Bee, March 31, 2012 – click on http://www.sacbee.com/2012/03/31/4380423/gov-jerry-brown-to-change-high.html
At this point we stopped reading this stuff and are trying to brace ourselves for the next absurdity. Bear with us. We need to recover before plunging into it again.
In the meantime, California is approaching insolvency.
Afterthought: If the first $2.3 billion batch of railroad bonds is actually authorized to be issued and sold by April 12th, like it says in the paper, then (a) what will be the rate of interest payable by those bonds, and (b) what will be the source of the money used for those interest payments?
Correction. The original plans called for 12 trains per hour, not per day, in each direction.