Infrastructure upgrade is critical, across the country.

....not one company asking to bid is from the U.S. ....

AnsaldoBreda
Bombardier Transportation
China South Locomotive & Rolling Stock
China North Locomotive & Rolling Stock
Hyundai Rotem
Kawasaki Heavy Industries Rolling Stock
Siemens Mobility
Talgo

These notes came from Wikipedia although are not reliable, but maybe so. Could be signs of TPP initiatives? All however, are Asian or European, plus one Canadian company.

Why aren't we bidding? Any major corporation of our country could do this !!!

Siemens has a plant in Sacramento building light rail cars.

Don't be so selfish!



It's not like the wealthy are being selfish!!

"equipment made in this country, with parts also fabricated here" I honestly thought the cars were going to be made in China. So glad that is not the case. California needs state of the art high speed rail and it needs it NOW. I'm salivating at the idea of a two hour ride to San Francisco, and the easing of traffic going east to Vegas!

Imagine Bernie Sanders' infrastructure bill and how much that could generate in jobs and manufacturing??

Canadian, german.

pay their fair taxes. Jobs, I hope so that at least pay fair wages with health care. China, Japan, already bought a lot of America during the Bushie Adm.

any such rail. The law requires foreign makers to fabricate and build in the US if they get the bid. The State of Oregon recently purchased two train sets from Talgo which makes great cars, there are rail car manufacturers in Oregon but none are tooled for high speed and most are busy with the sort of work they do regularly. We're building streetcars here again, supplying Tucson and DC and Portland and other cities. We do freight cars like mad. High Speed is a new creature. I'd buy Talgo because I like their cars and they have nearly 200 operating train sets around the world. Smooth as silk.
http://unitedstreetcar.com/

....maybe it should be noted how our industrial machine built from scratch......

. our military might during WW II.... Our factories produced new weapons in months; not years.
. Maybe we should be reminded that we put a man on the moon with no experience.

My point is this ....

. We need jobs and we can do this again and again if our political leaders would stop being bought out by the lobbyists from these companies/nations.

. We need living wage jobs; not jobs from Burger King or McDonalds.

I do not believe necessarily in colonialism, but our country needs more jobs to pay living wages....I mean MORE JOBS period!!!!

This is likely going to take some new facilities.

We almost got a new facility in Milwaukee for passenger units for high-speed trains but then Walker led in the teahad and the com

...we could rework those existing factories and retool!! We in this nation are the nation of YES not
NO !! Please California, please Governor Brown, LET'S GET GOING !! Get us good wages.

The higher wages will generate much in tax revenues to improve much in America.

Things aren't looking so great at the moment.

There's a lot of cheering over the first segment moving forward, but supporters are forgetting (or choosing to ignore) the fact that HSR has to go back before voters at least once more, and that every single poll run over the past several years has shown that HSR can no longer scrape up even a simple majority of likely voters, and that support for HSR actually DROPS when the terms of the new plan are explained to people.

My gut feeling is that California is currently building a very expensive set of tracks across the Central Valley that BNSF will be running freight trains on in 10 years. The assumption that voters will approve an additional $60 billion in bonds to finish the system, on top of the $10 billion that the voters originally approved, seems to be based on nothing but blind hope.

If they'd built the first segment over the Tehachapi's, we'd have at least been left with the ability to extend our current 80MPH Amtrak San Joaquin line (which connects the Bay Area to Bakersfield) to Southern California. It would only be "medium speed rail", but it would have still been a huge step up from what we have now. Because they chose to build the first segment out in the tules, the states will have nothing to show for the $10 billion already spent if the voters don't okay the rest of the money. Well, not "nothing"...some people have already pointed out that the electrified section of the new track could be used to power electrified freight trains, which would reduce air pollution a bit...but that's a LOT of money to spend for a rather tiny environmental benefit.

To say, "well we already started, we HAVE to finish it now".

Hopefully the voters will remember the Bay Bridge debacle.

The costs of this thing are staggering. The real problem is that, if everything is funded via another taxpayer approved bond issue, the state will be left holding the bag for more than a billion dollars a year in bond payments. That's a billion dollars a year the state will be paying out just in debt...it doesn't count in any operational costs to actually run the thing. The state legislature is handcuffed by Prop 13, which means that taxes cannot easily be increased to cover the additional debt. Much of that billion dollars a year will be carved out of school and university funding, road maintenance, state parks, and other state financial obligations. There's already been some discussion that many normally dependable political organizations like the teachers unions and the state employee unions may come out in opposition to another bond measure if that problem isn't resolved before election day. If Californian's are given the choice between "Trains or Teachers", the $10 billion we've approved so far will end up being wasted money.

The bullet train supporters are cultists who like the concept at the expense of math, people who stand to personally profit from this boondoggle, and Jerry Brown who so desperately wants a legacy.

Who wants to get from LA to SF to visit my sister and niece without having the TSA anal probe me

The Feds kicked in some money for this.

I have taken a train before.

If you think there won't be the same rectal probe to board the train, then I fear you are seriously deluding yourself. One bomb detonated on the HSR tracks will bring a 100 billion project to a standstill. Why wouldn't the TSA seize upon the possibility of terrorism to expand their footprint?

And the TSA is not in any train station I have been in.

It is also considerably more difficult to steer a train into a huge building. In fact it is so hard that its basically a non-threat.

Yes a train can be bombed. So can a freeway. Will say the TSA pat me down before I get in my truck? I don't think so.

I was gonna say "I hope you prove me wrong" but that would require this mess actually being completed.

I'm thinking more of a Madrid 3/11 scenario.

The TSA DOES perform security checks, including bag scans and patdowns, at train stations. The difference is that they show up randomly at stations rather than being a permanent fixture. You can ride the same train every week for years without getting hassled, and then one day show up to find a TSA VIPR crew patting everyone down and checking everyone's purses and bags.

And, for what it's worth, the state has included a requirement that all HSR stations be designed to facilitate TSA inspections of passengers. The stations won't be open platforms like you see with Amtrak today, or like you see at high speed rail platforms in Japan or Europe but will be closed facilities with access choke points designed to facilitate security screening. The state hasn't come out and said that the TSA will be screening everyone who rides the bullet train, but it's clear that they're planning for that eventuality. The scans will likely be focused more on bombs and guns than nail clippers, but the lines and theater will be just as onerous.