High Speed Victorville, California to Las Vegas Rail Line Targeted for Spring Construction Start
Posted on: January 15, 2021, 02:04h.
Last updated on: January 15, 2021, 03:03h.
Construction on a high-speed rail line connecting Victorville, Calif. to Las Vegas could begin this spring.
Brightline West said in a status update this month the company is “on target” to begin building the $8-billion rail project this spring.
The line would connect Victorville, Calif. to Las Vegas with rapid trains running along the I-15 corridor. Victorville is 85 miles east of Los Angeles and in San Bernardino County. The status update was spelled out in a Jan. 4 letter from Brightline West President Sarah Watterson to the Nevada High-Speed Rail Authority, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
The project stalled late last year when a proposed $2.4-billion bond sale to finance the early stages of the rail line did not attract investors. Watterson said the coronavirus pandemic was partly to blame.
In the status update, she said that “election uncertainty, the lack of approval of a COVID-19 vaccine, and lack of liquidity in the market did not allow us to price the bonds to provide long-term stability for the company.”
Watterson said there is support this year for a bond allocation, according to the Review-Journal.
However, Terry Reynolds, director of the Nevada Department of Business and Industry, told the newspaper the state has a limited amount of time to address the bond proposal. He said that decision probably won’t happen until this summer.
Past Failures
Longtime residents of Southern Nevada have heard discussions for decades regarding a high-speed rail line from Los Angeles to Las Vegas.
When construction on the latest venture was delayed last year, KSNV-TV reporter Tom Hawley said during a broadcast, “Shelving high-speed rail plans is not exactly new here. We’ve been hearing variations going back three-and-a-half decades.”
Hawley hosts a news segment called “Video Vault” on the Las Vegas NBC affiliate. In a segment last month about the Brightline West delay, Hawley showed a December 1985 news clip featuring reporter Donna Cline. As the reporter speaks, viewers see file footage of a high-speed train zipping through empty terrain.
You’re looking at a super-speed train similar to one that as early as 1992 could connect Las Vegas with cities in Southern California,” Cline says.
Hawley then tells viewers the current proposal would be ready to provide rail service from Los Angeles to Las Vegas in 2029 “under the most optimistic scenario.”
Tourism Woes
As Hawley noted, the effort to improve ground transportation between Southern California and Las Vegas has been a long-term goal for the Nevada tourism industry. Three years ago, nearly a fifth of visitors to Las Vegas was from Southern California, according to media reports.
Because of its remote desert location, Las Vegas has relied upon air travel to bring in large numbers of people. The nearest large metropolitan areas, Los Angeles and Phoenix are at least four to five hours or more away by car.
Since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in March, air travel to and from Las Vegas’ McCarran International Airport has declined by millions of passengers.
With air travel in a pandemic-related slump, the visitor volume in Las Vegas has been slow to recover. In response, some hotel-casinos on the Las Vegas Strip have shut down part or all of their operations during the slow midweek days.
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Last Comments ( 53 )
How about you spend much less by widening the 15 into an autobahn freeway with lanes for unlimited speed limit. Everyone wants to do 150 on the 15 anyway.
This is a longtime coming and overdue. Great project that needed Nevada to start it not the politics in California. The Japanese Chinese, Swiss,French, and Swedish all have high speed trains that criss cross dangerous terrain, along the ring of fire and have been doin this for decades. The US needs to catch up!
First of all, the train station will be built in Apple Valley off of Dale Evens Ave. NOT in Victor Ville! It's no wonder their aren't many investors! Victorville is a dead city, no room for growth or over developed. The proposed site in Apple Valley is wide open with unlimited prospects for development that would benefit from a new rail line and yard.
A better project would be to run a monorail from the high desert, to San Bernardino, then Los Angeles. This would go on top of the 15, 215 and 10 freeways. This would help relieve commuter congestion.
This has been talked about so long I could of walked to Vegas from the Inland Empire and back 5 times in that span.Stop the talk and get it together
I like it.. Its a good idea or option! Next to driving or flying...
This would be great for the community and just so you people get some knowledge this isn’t the FIRST bullet train. Japan has it and you don’t hear about incident with that one. If anything finally America is catching up. Excited for this project to get started.
Hey Kenneth Dennis, We need your two cents like a hole in the head! Why don't you go back to the rock where you came from and crawl under it! Such a waste of time! Get a life dude!
From Victorville to Los Angeles via Palmdale? I guess this would be part 2 of the rail project?
How many people will die on a train when the 8+ earthquake hits? All of them. No thanks.
So the only reason anyone wants to read this tripe is to find out how fast the train goes...fail
What an absolutely stupid idea. We need this like we need another virus.
it will be a good thing for union carpenters and everyone involved to get this process going
Please fix your article! It’s Apple Valley, Not Victorville. Victorville likes to claim Credit for everything and quite frankly was one of the holdups in getting this off the ground.
This will be a wonderful thing for all community’s. I’m pretty excited to see this happen. Good luck