High-speed rail connection between Las Vegas and California breaks ground

LAS VEGAS (KLAS) — Skeptics called the idea, a runaway train. Now, the long-anticipated and first high-speed rail in the United States began construction in the Vegas Valley on Monday.

US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo, Sen. Jacky Rosen, California Rep. Pete Aguilar, and others attended the groundbreaking for Brightline West, marking the ceremonial beginning of construction on the 218-mile connection between Las Vegas and Southern California. The planned four-year process – expected to fill the 200-foot median between I-15 North and South – has been ongoing since March.

Brightline and government officials estimate its first passengers to take the roughly two-hour-long one-way ride ahead of the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.

Brightline currently operates a rail line in Florida – the newest passenger rail in a century – though Founder and Chairman Wes Edens says it does not go the speed necessary to consider it a true “high-speed rail.” He anticipated these trains in the west to reach up to 200 miles per hour.

In a March report from the Los Angeles Times, Edens told reporter Noah Bierman that a round-trip ticket from Los Angeles to Las Vegas would cost “more than $400.”

On Monday, he backstepped those comments.

“The truth is, like, fifty cents to a dollar, those are good metrics to kind of look at,” Edens told reporters Monday, referencing the average breakdown of high-speed rails across the world. “As with any transportation system, there will be very early rides that are cheaper. There’s the peak rides that are more expensive or whatnot. So, it’s a blend of all of those things. We’re four years away from needing to put a specific price point on it.”

The project, in total, is estimated to cost $12 billion. Just over half has been secured so far, paving the way for the groundbreaking.

Funding sources so far for Brightline West include:

• $2.5 billion in private activity bonds announced in January

• $3 billion grant for the Nevada Department of Transportation, allocated to the project and announced in December

• $1 billion private activity bond approved in 2020

• $25 million grant to the San Bernardino County Transportation Authority announced in June

Brightline tells 8 News Now that the remaining funding needed will be privately sourced.

Officials from the Miami, Florida-based company have called the system the “greenest form of transportation in the world.” The project will connect a terminal south of the Las Vegas Strip to a facility to be built in Rancho Cucamonga, California.

“You can put a fence over the top of it, basically. You can electrify it. It will be electrified with renewable power, so it will truly be the greenest, fastest train in the country,” Edens said. He notes that around 3 million cars are expected to be removed from I-15 annually, along with 400,000 tons of carbon emissions.

The decades-old plan for a high-speed railway connection between the entertainment capital of the world and Southern California is littered with start-and-stop attempts to bring the project to fruition — long before Brightline’s involvement. For his part, Edens said the Las Vegas to Southern California route is a repeatable process for future high-speed rail candidates.

“Today is long overdue,” he said. “But the blueprint we’ve created with Brightline will allow us to repeat this model in other city pairs around the country.”

The U.S. Transportation Secretary echoed those sentiments by acknowledging Monday’s groundbreaking as the beginnings of “the high-speed rail era in the United States of America.”

“It’s even a benefit for supply chains because so many trucks are on the corridor, which will be less congested,” Buttigieg said to media. “Once even one American buys a ticket and actually rides on a good high speed train on American soil, this will become a nation-wide expectation and the demand for this will only increase.”

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