Vegas and California High-Speed Rail systems to connect at Palmdale

http://cahsr.blogspot.com/2009/06/harry-reid-abandons-maglev-for.html?showComment=1244623529294#c7323782033747702832

Peter said...

Obviously connecting the DX from Victorville directly to Ontario would serve large portions of LA and SD far better than a connection at Palmdale. The problem is simply money.

A direct connection to LA means going through the Cajon Pass. There already are 3 freight lines and 8 (I think from google maps) lanes of I-15 going through the pass. The freight lines are heavily speed restricted due to grades and sharp turns. Basically the surface of the pass is completely congested and would never work for HSR. That means the only choice is a 5-10 mile long tunnel going right through it. That's not terribly long, but the tunnel will be crossing the San Andreas fault underground, which will add lots of complications. This will probably be on the order of $5-10 billion to build. However since this only serves SoCal you'd also want to build the Mojave/Barstow connection at the same time.

Palmdale to Victorville on the other hand is absolutely trivial to build. It's 50 miles of completely flat nothing. Given DX costs, this should be on the order of $1 billion.

A Palmdale to Victorville connection is an extremely cheap, quick, and "good enough" solution that should be done soon. From NorCal a direct line from Mojave to Barstow would only cut 10% of the SF->LV travel distance. It'd be fairly cheap and easy to add, but I doubt there will be enough traffic to justify it. For SoCal a tunnel would cut about 25% of the travel distance. If there's enough SoCal traffic to justify it (which I don't doubt) and someone comes up with the $billions needed for the tunnel (who's paying, CA, NV, or DX?), there's nothing stopping it from being added later.

June 10, 2009 1:45 AM