By William C. Vantuono, Editor-in-Chief, Railway Age Magazine; February 21, 2019
By now, everybody in the rail management and advocacy communities, along with much of the general public, knows what happened to California’s high-speed rail (HSR) project. It’s dead. In his State of the State address, Governor Gavin Newsom scaled it down. Seven days later, the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) finished the job with a letter from Administrator Ron Batory to Newsom and California High-Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA) CEO Brian P. Kelly.
The FRA is terminating its cooperative agreement with CHSRA because the agency “will not complete the project by 2022,” the performance deadline. Newsom’s new proposal “represents a significant retreat from the State’s initial vision,” which included running the high-speed line beyond the Central Valley to Los Angeles and San Francisco, and that the FRA intends to “de-obligate” nearly $1 billion that had previously been obligated under the now-revoked agreement. The FRA wasted no time, but is difficult to fathom how knowledgeable people could have been surprised by the ultimate result.