So as the sun set in the West, the California high speed rail folks were going to build the initial segment of the proposed high speed rail route down the middle of the Central Valley, between Bakersfield and Fresno, in the middle of nowhere, along a route that in itself could not possibly support the effort and amortize its multi-billion dollar cost. The feds expressed their disinclination to give the near-insolvent state of California any more money, so that the California high speed rail authority was left to hope that the Lord would provide the funds necessary for doing the job as sold to the voters in 2008, since voter approval was necessary in order to issue that $9 billion in bonds that would fund this effort.

Now, following a familiar law of politics (like nature abhoring a vacuum, politcs abhors the presence of unspent money), the $9 billion pot of high speed rail money is attracting a swarm of governmental bees that want a piece of the action so they can spend it in their own back yards. You’d thing meeting their desire would be impossible, since a railroad, whether high speed or not, can only run on one route, so if you build it in the form of a dedicated high-speed rail corridor in the Central Valley, you won’t be able to build it elsewhere . Right? Wrong. If you think so, it only goes to show that you don’t understand how the government mind works.

According to a recent issue of the Los Angeles Times (Dan Weikel and Ralph Vartabedian, Bullet Train Focus Shifts to Local Rails, February 20, 2012, p. AA1), various local government bees are buzzing around that $9 billion pot of money. Instead of starting the proposed high speed rail in the middle of the proposed Central Valley route and building out to its termini, these folks are plumping for the “book ends” approach, which we frankly don’t understand because it does not mean, as you might suppose, that they want to build the termini and then lay the high speed tracks inward to meet in the middle.

No, what these folks want is a piece of the action in order to “upgrade local rail corridors that could become part of the proposed high speed network.” (Emphasis added). This proposal would require spending $4 billion now, “which would leave just a few billion in the state’s voter-approved finance package.” As the proponents of this new proposal would have it (quoting from the L.A. Times):

“Giving local rail improvements a higher priority . . .represents a retrenchment from the original vision that the bullet train would be a state-of-the-art system, running on dedicated track its entire length. The new proposal would blend the bullet train into existing rail corridors and make it share track with commuter trains and even freight railroads.”

We don’t know about you, but it will take ten strong men to get us, kicking and screaming, aboard a 200-mph train that shares its tracks with lumbering freight trains. But what do we know?

More importantly, our feelings aside, this is not what the poor, dumb, screwed California voters voted for when they approved the issuance of $9 billion in bonds for a state of the art, high speed, 240 mph “bullet” train. But hey man, what’s a little bait-and-switch between friends?

And that’s the way it goes. Stay tuned.

The Chicago Sun Times reports that, with a considerable whoop-te-do Amtrak has launched a high-speed rail link outside the Northeast corridor. Where? Between Chicago and Kalamazoo. See Mark Brown, Speeding to Kalamazoo Aboard Amtrak’s High-Speed Train, suntimes.com, February 16, 2012 — click here.  We rise above temptation to wonder out loud who would want to go to Kalamazoo in such a hurry — if that is what it is (keep reading) — and why, but the point of this story is something else.

The highest speed reached by this train on its run between Chicago and Kalamazoo was 110 mph. Wow! Sounds fast. But it turns out that the previous average train speed on that route was 95 mph, so that going 110 mph, according to Amtrak officials, shaved off only 10 minutes from the trip.

Now comes the best part.  It turns out that back in 1934 the Pioneer Zephyr train (also known as the Silver Streak) made the same run, hitting a top speed of 112.5 mph. So with all the foofaraw about high-tech, high-speed rail, and all the associated high-tech hoopla, we didn’t quite make the top speed of the train that ran on this route in 1934 — some three quarters of a century ago.

Here is an interesting article in the Washington Post recounting the ups and downs of Californi’s proposed high-speed railroad that if built would eventually link San Diego and San Francisco, although its first segment is proposed for the middle of nowhere, in the Central Valley between Bakersfield and Fresno. The Post article contains a good, balanced summary of the problem, and if you haven’t been following the California high speed railroad caper, is a good place to get briefed on the problem. See  Plans for High-Speed Rail Are Slowing Down, The Washington Post, January 15, 2012, click here

In the meantime, back in California, Governor Jerry Brown takes the position of “damn the growing State debt, full speed ahead.” He wants that railroad built, and he wants to start construction now. Evidently, at least according to the Times, the Guv wants to establish his “legacy” in the form of construction of major projects that will make California what it once was, when his father was Governor. Nice try, Jerry.

The problem is that today’s California is flat broke and considers it an annual achievement to cobble together a state budget that is only a few billion short of being balanced. Make no mistake, we happen to like choo-choo trains ourselves and use them regularly on our trips to San Diego, but as the Good Book says, for everything there is a season, and right now, when the once Golden State of California is flat-broke, may not be the time to take on a debt of some $100 billion that, as all other projected costs of public projects, is certain to wind up costing much more than that.

See Governor Jerry Brown’s State of that State Speech Puts Focus on Big Projects, January 19, 2012 – click here

For an alternative vision of California we offer the following excerpt from today’s column of historian Victor Davis Hansen:

“In my state, Californians for 40 years have hiked taxes; grown their
government; vastly expanded entitlements; put farmland, timberland and oil and
gas lands off limits; and opened their borders to millions of illegal aliens.
They apparently assumed that they had inherited so much wealth from prior
generations and that their state was so naturally rich, that a continually
better life was their natural birthright.

“It wasn’t. Now, as in Greece, the veneer of civilization is proving pretty thin in California. Hospitals no longer have the money to offer sophisticated long-term medical care to the indigent.
Cities no longer have the funds to self-insure themselves from the accustomed
barrage of monthly lawsuits. When thieves rip copper wire out of street lights,
the streets stay dark. Most state residents would rather go to the dentist these
days than queue up and take a number at the Department of Motor
Vehicles. Hospital emergency rooms neither have room nor act as if there’s
much of an emergency.

“Traffic flows no better on most of the state’s freeways than it did 40 years
ago — and often much worse, given the crumbling infrastructure and increased
traffic. Once-excellent K-12 public schools now score near the bottom in
nationwide tests. The California state university system
keeps adding administrators to the point where they have almost matched the
number of faculty, although half of the students who enter CSU need remedial
reading and math. Despite millions of dollars in tutoring, half the students
still don’t graduate. The taxpayer is blamed in constant harangues for not
ponying up more money, rather than administrators being faulted for a lack of
reform.”

In 1960 there were far fewer government officials, far fewer prisons, far
fewer laws and far fewer lawyers — and yet the state was a far safer place than
it is a half-century later. Technological progress — whether iPhones or Xboxes
— can often accompany moral regress. There are not yet weeds in our cities, but
those too may be coming.

“The average Californian, like the average Greek, forgot that civilization is
fragile. Its continuance requires respect for the law, tough-minded education,
collective thrift, private investment, individual self-reliance, and common
codes of behavior and civility — and exempts no one from those rules. Such
knowledge and patterns of civilized behavior, slowly accrued over centuries, can
be lost in a single generation.”

All aboard!

Afterthought. For another excellent article juxtaposing the state of California in bygone days with its current condition,  read Jennifer Rubin, California, There It Went, Commentary, October 2010, at p. 43. Rubin writes not only as a journalist, but also as a former resident who lived in California for 40 years, and then decided to move back East.

As if all the calamities that have befallen the proposed California high speed rail weren’t enough, here comes another one. The California High-Speed Rail Peer Review Group delivered its report yesterday, concluding that the proposed railroad from San Diego to San Francisco is deeply flawed and not financially feasible. It recommended that the State Legislature not appropriate any money to it, not even the initial $2.7 billion in bonds to match $3.5 billion in federal money. For the whole megilla, read Ralph Vartabedian and Dan Weikel, Review Urges Delay in Borrowing Billions for Bullet Train, L.A. Times, January 4, 2012 — click here http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-bullet-train-report-20120104,0,3258448.story.

The bottom line of the report is that apart from the piddly few billion allocated thus far to the initial leg of the $98.5 billion railroad (between Bakersfield and Fresno — down the middle of Central Valley where few likely passengers live, and as most Californians believe, is the middle of nowhere) is unlikely to be followed by additional construction due to lack of funds. The review group supports a high-speed rail line, but feels that starting the project in the middle of Central Valley “maximizes the risk to the state.”

So the line-up against going ahead with the high-speed rail as presently envisioned now includes the State Auditor, the State Inspector General, the Legislative Analyst, The UC Berkeley Institute of Transportation Studies, and the Transportation Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives. But our Governor and his friends in the labor unions are all for it.

So stay tuned and see what happens — we can’t wait, though we fear it will be a long wait.