I thought I didn’t receive the email, but gmail thought it was junk.

There should be a way to change the “from” address for your notification emails, that should help with the spam issue, they’re currently being sent “from” cahsrblo@box419.bluehost.com

Good to hear Alstom now has a refurb shop in California. It’s not a factory but they’ve got to start somewhere. The address is 450 Pintado St, Vallejo but that’s actually on the Mare Island side.

I think Siemens will likely have the best chances of winning the contract to build the rolling stock for HSR. They already have a long-term presence in the state and have a number of very adaptable products to offer. Especially after their Velaro products have been running for a few years in China and Russia, assuming they prove to be reliable.

for the deniers here’s a nice article about Iowa of all places… what’s going on out there in those cornfields anyway, crazy Iowans, first gay marriage and now this

It’s interesting that JR Central wants in on some US HSR projects. They don’t actually build any trains, although they do do a lot of engineering work on tracks and such.

@Robert

Any chance you could move the comments link for each article to the bottom of the article? I usually want to read the article before commenting, at which point having the link at the bottom is more convenient.

Also the link takes you to the head of the article, rather than the beginning of the comments (I assume the link is intended to take you directly to comments, as indicated by the “#comments” portion of the URL)

Thanks for the great site!

Personally, I like the AGV. It meets the 220mph requirement and combines both benefits of an average HSR train (Shinkansen and Velaro) and a TGV.

Well Robert over at California Progress report puts on his economist hat and declares

CalPERS, for its part, should start investing in sustainable projects. One specific thing they could do is invest money in our high speed rail project, and be repaid out of some of the operating surpluses from the trains.

All I can say, is thank heavens Robert is not a trustee of CalPERS. For that pension fund to even think about investing in the Highly risky venture would be the most outrageous act for any trustee to propose.

What really should happen is this project should stop and stop now. The State has way too much debt and Robert just taxing everybody is not the way to solve the problem.

While I’m at it, I’m just compare the credentials of Wendell Cox and Joseph Vranich (a life long Democract I might add), authors of the Reason Report to yours.

You say you have debunked their report. Nonsense. You just spin your tales. These guys did the research, they understand what a lousy hopeless project this is.

Its your blog, say what you want — you can censor what you want, but you just go way overboard and quite frankly I think most of even the pro HSR people realize that.

This is ridiculous. Every time I go to log in, I get another error message and none of my passwords or log in info works. I have been round and round with this.

YOu know I totally don’t get how this blog works, I try to reply to someone and my reply turns up way over someplace else no where near where I clicked. I miss the old blog. It was so easy to use. Thi one I have to go back and forth and read here and here. its really confusing.

and once I reply, then the place where I was reading is gone and I have to scroll all through the blog, ( and the whole thing looks the same cuz there’s no avatars or fonts or anything,) to find my place to continue reading the thread.

andwhat about delete? what if you want to delete your comment? I don’t see a delete button.

In other rail news: “The Proposition 1A (CA High Speed Rail) bonds, approved by California voters in the November 2008 general election, offer another potential funding source for the Capitol Corridor. Of the $9.95 billion allotted for the high speed train system, $190 million is designated for the State’s intercity rail corridors to connect with high speed trains.****** Each of the three existing corridors is to get $47.5 million, with the remaining $47.5 million to be allocated on a competitive basis.***** Currently, the California Transportation Commission (CTC) is developing guidelines to allocate these Proposition 1A bond funds to connecting intercity rail and mass transit services. The CCJPA is optimally positioned to be a distributor and connecting service to the high speed trains. As such, it has identified a list of track infrastructure projects between Sacramento and San Jose that will improve reliability, decrease travel times, and add Capitol Corridor trains to/from San Jose (a major high speed train terminal) and Sacramento (a later phase high speed intermodal terminal).”
from this report businessplan

wow thats 142 million for Amtrak California to upgrade CCJPA, San Joaquins, and Smurfliners! (47.5m each) cool beans!

and curtains for all! “To keep the train cars looking fresh and new, Amtrak and Caltrans will start replacing carpets, cloth wainscot, and seat upholstery on all coaches in the Amtrak California fleet beginning in February 2009. ***Window curtains*** will also be added exclusively on the Northern California fleet.”

If one looks at (by far and away) the most successful new non-Chinese HSR program on the planet — Spain’s — one will note:
* There was basically NO “domestic content” (ie unskilled, shoddy, incompetent make-work assembly by local yokels) in the design or vehicle construction of the starter system.
That initial line, Madrid-Sevilla, using quite literally off-the-shelf track, overhead and signalling (German) and vehicles (French) was on time, on budget, technically unambitious, risk-averse, and a massive success.
* As a direct result, Spain had a great record to build on, politically and technically. And building wildly it is. Compare and contrast with the world-class failures in the backgrounds of PB (= BART), Quentin Kopp (= BART), Rod Diridon (= VTA rail), etc.
* Spain’s growing system today adheres to international standards for signalling (ETCS/ERTMS), track design, electrification and platform interface (UIC, UIC TSI) and a a result ADIF and RENFE are able to procure working designs from multiple vendors (their extensive first-adopter teething problems with Siemens AVE S-103 notwithstanding and now overcome.)
* Spain has a policy of procuring vehicles and systems from multiple vendors, to avoid the sort of rent-seeking, sole-source vendor lock-in for which PB’s offspring BART is the poster child. Spain’s continues to order HS trains from Alstom, CAF, Bombardier, Talgo and Siemens, ensuring that there is the semblance of a real market for competitive products, not just “take it of leave it” from a politically fixed sole source sleaze-master. Likewise ETCS train control (Ansaldo, Thales, Invensys, Alstom)
* After having inaugurated a successful first system using 100% proven, foreign expertise and design, Spain has transitioned to higher domestic content (eg Velaros assembly) and, more impoortantly, to becoming a global leader in vehicle and system design and integration.

Spain in 1986, which AVE Madrid-Sevilla was decided upon, was very much a technically backward, third-world (in rail terms) country, recently emerging form a fascist dictatorship. (Parallels somewhere? We can only hope.)

By a cautious program of adopting (ie copying) proven systems, going for “low hanging fruit” in route choice, ridership and engineering (contrast Pacheco), gradually building local expertise over time, using adherence to standards to promote multi-vendor competition, and actively avoiding sole source vendor capture, the country has achieved a outstandingly successful and spectacularly fast-growing network, with huge political support and the lowest construction costs anywhere (despite piles of globally notable engineering feats in the bridge and tunnel departments — it’s not a flat country.)