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Super Slow: Delayed California Bullet Train Makes Push To Complete Contract

Super Slow: Delayed California Bullet Train Makes Push To Complete Contract
Bullet Train

The California bullet train authority (CBTA) is pushing forward with an ambitious plan to issue its biggest contract in history.

The CBTA issued a 30-year-long contract to install track, set up high-voltage electrical lines, create a digital signaling system, build a heavy maintenance train garage and obligate future maintenance of the equipment and track.

The full project would install future train tracks from San Jose to Bakersfield, slightly more than half of the originally proposed Los Angeles-to-San Francisco system.

If approved, the maintenance contract would lock the state of California, and needed equipment, on segments that it currently does not have money to build.

The bullet train project obtained two grants during the Obama administration for a total of about $3.5 billion. Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Transportation terminated a 2010 grant for $929 million that had not been spent. The state sued to reverse the decision.

Under the federal grants, California has to complete 119 miles of rail structures and install track in the Central Valley by 2022, but there is no requirement for electrical power, signals or a maintenance facility.

The work is far behind schedule, and only a third of all the bridges, viaducts, and other structures have even started construction. The work was originally supposed to have been completed by 2017 at a cost of $6 billion. Now the cost is set at $10.6 billion.

If the state fails to accelerate its current slow work pace, it could end up not having all the civil work completed to install track by 2022, it would $2.5 billion that it borrowed from the Federal Government.

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