FYI, over on Twitter, the California High Speed Rail Authority just posted a conceptual animation of how their high speed line will traverse Tehachapi pass at the famous loop:
https://twitter.com/CaHSRA/status/1669827189582299137

I thought I'd share this here because the HSR project will dramatically change the landscape around the historic Tehachapi Loop freight route.

California makes the politicians in Ayn Rand novels look competent. About 20 billion and ten years and they might have a couple of miles of graded roadbed to show off.

With single track and passing sidings, they were saying, "to save money".

That is like saying in 1968: "Hundreds of billions of dollars and ten years and not one person has been carried to the moon yet." Or, "there is not any traffic out on the Verrazzano-Narrows, why can't they spend the money in Manhattan where we need it." Etc.

I suspect that a lot of the people complaining about building HSR the way they have are somehow related to city administrators in the LA area who were hoping to siphon money for their own projects, which they can't because it is being built all-new starting in rural areas. Which is the point. Ray LaHood, the former Republican representative from my old district in Illinois who was the Secretary of Transportation at the time "didn't just fall off a turnip truck" as they used to say in CA, i.e. he wasn't a fool.

Unfortunately while I'm all in favor of a good gigaproject, California's HSR is plainly being run like Thomas Durant's Union Pacific - you can tell by the opening moves. UP turned in an odd direction to earn the land grants. California HSR started with the easiest-to-build parts as a lure, in the hopes that the people will fall for "the fallacy of sunk costs" and relent to build the costly rest.

A proper project would focus on the hard part - the Grapevine base tunnel, which would be a Switzerland-tier undertaking. Once that was well along, the funding would loosen right up for the easier parts. Or existing rail could be used for those sections and upgraded incrementally.

No, no, no. Go back and see what LaHood, the Transportation Secretary at the time and the person who had the most to do with the design at the administrative level, said: the hijacking of funds for unrelated projects I already mentioned, and heading off land speculation in the central valley was certainly another reason. But the main reason for building HSR out in the flats is that it is High Speed Rail between LA and the Bay Area, and if you started in the urban areas you might have nice solutions to urban transportation on which you have spent a lot of money, but you still wouldn't have high speed rail.

The proposed tunnel under Grapevine mountain is going to make going under the Alps in Switzerland look like digging a hole through a molehill. That mountain along 2 convergence zones for 2 different faults for and your looking at a 50 to 60 mile long tunnel. It is longer than the Chunnel thru some of the toughest rock out there.

Or -- far more likely -- be a many-order-of-magnitude modern version of the Coffee Creek project on the C&NYAL... likely with the same overall result.
But it does go hand-in-hand with single-tracking the leftover 'interurban' service...

1907? Did they have 200+ MPH bullet trains and PTC using satellites back then, I must have missed that, but it seems to have been a fraud akin to Theranos/ Elizabeth Homes and not a serious effort anyway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_% ... e_Railroad

Besides the technological advances the main difference is that CAHSR is a publicly-funded entity to meet a publicly-identified need (shortening travel times, improving safety and reducing emissions using proven technology on the LA-Bay area corridor) and thus are not forced to be myopic or defeatist, or too good to be true. In a dark blue state.

119 miles are under construction, 21 miles completed, all double track: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luX35wVJt84&t=21s

130mph electric railcars were a "thing" in 1903. Low-grade high-speed mains were a prominent 'thing' in the Ramsey survey of 1906, which also had tunnels long enough to require route electrification (the idea good enough for a well-documented second attempt just before the Great Depression destroyed most of the perceived need).

The premise of the Chicago - New York Airline Railway was to use electric traction and modern improvements in construction for 100mph speeds -- considered mainstream 'fast' back then -- to get New York-Chicago times down to 10 hours on a direct route. Admittedly some of their promotional material had a crayonista route reminiscent of 'Voici votre chemin de fer', but that was an age where railroads were THE way to get between the two cities, and someone in the contemporary press noted that the first railroad to run high-speed electrified service between New York and Chicago wouldn't get most of the long-distance and M&E traffic, they'd get all of it.

More likely a scam, although an unintentional one, was the Weems scheme to use electric traction effectively at miniature robot scale -- and the very likeliest way for this to have been built 'effectively' and securely would be to co-locate it with a low-curve low-grade line of the kind the C&NYAL should have wound up with. This was more or less a glorified telpher with what passed for streamlining in the 1890s, strictly for mail and express but possessed of 150mph speed (they claimed to have achieved this on test, but their suspension even with overhead additional rail guidance is, to say the least, suspect)

The "200+mph" is something of a joke, considering the way the stops in the Central Valley are spaced, and the expedient of service into the Bay Area (which will be barely HrSR at best).

If they have come to their senses about expedient single-tracking to save infrastructure and 'maintenance' cost -- more power to them!

No one would like to see CAHSR succeed at genuine high-speed transportation than I would. While it remains to be seen what actually gets built and run, there are certainly near-OTS designs now available, so that's not a major concern. What is, though, is how much it's going to cost for normal Californians to ride the parts that get built, seeing that the outsize cost of the consultant-boondoggling has to be paid entirely out of future revenue.

Both the original Ramsey-survey line and the Air Line were essentially killed by the Panic of 1907. I have never quite figured out whether the Sam Rea Line survey was a vanity project or actually in planning before 1931, but it certainly wasn't afterward (and I consider it a very good thing that it wasn't, seeing how high-speed railway technology panned out...)

Incidentally, can someone post a link to the current design state of the Grapevine base tunnel or engineered alternatives?

They didn't have to dig endless tunnels through fault zones to get to the moon. But I get it, I get it, on a forum having "railway" right in its name there can be no conclusion besides "trains = good" and "no trains = bad". Middle ground not acceptable. Lets keep those bicyclists off Saluda while we're at it; a PSR-minded NS might want to send traffic that way again some day.

We gave up on the Moon after Wallace and Gromit confirmed there's no cheese up there.

The current map shows them avoiding the Grapevine and going around through Palmdale, even though that route is around 25 miles longer, mostly because a property developer threw a fit as I recall: https://buildhsr.com/map/

Frankly I always thought it made more sense to go via Palmdale if you're wanting the greatest prospective take rate for the high-speed service (at the corresponding high-speed price). Even California could ill-afford that particular sort of base tunnel with that sort of seismic risk. (For what would seem to be effectively only a few minutes of prospective time saving per trip...)

What continues to be funny is that what I'd think would be the crown jewel and chief objective of California HSR -- the trip between the destination pair of the Los Angeles region and the San Francisco region -- is so ridiculously inadequate and compromised.