If you’ve ever been to Fresno, you might have noticed that while the Union Pacific trains operate on tracks immediately adjacent to Highway 99, BNSF trains operate in the middle of town, cutting through intersections and neighborhoods. Fresno residents would look with envy on what Palo Alto has to deal with, particularly since many of the trains that use these tracks are freight trains.

For nearly 100 years – since at least 1918 – Fresno has sought to consolidate the two rail corridors so that freight doesn’t have to operate in the middle of neighborhoods. There was some hope in recent years that high speed rail would accomplish this, by bringing the funds needed to build a new corridor that could accommodate passenger trains and UP and BNSF operations. Perhaps that was an ambitious plan, but it was the best hope for achieving the long-sought consolidation.

But that doesn’t look likely to happen. For consolidation to work using HSR, it would have had to bypass Fresno entirely, either to the northeast or southwest. The California High Speed Rail Authority and the city of Fresno are wisely moving forward instead with a downtown alignment following the UPRR corridor – where there isn’t enough room for both HSR and BNSF trains. The other alternatives, according to a new study, indicate it will cost between $800 million and $1.4 billion to do the consolidation. As a result, supporters of consolidation are throwing in the towel:

“The Web site’s coming down, and I’ve disconnected the phone that we had. It’s over and done with,” said Tom Bailey of Fresno Area Residents for Rail Consolidation.

Three years ago, Bailey estimated that moving the tracks could cost $500 million in addition to the $100 million set aside by Fresno County voters in November 2006 when they approved a 20-year extension of the Measure C half-cent transportation sales tax.

Six years earlier, the last formal study on the project had placed the cost at $247 to $319 million. But the new study, funded by the Council of Fresno County Governments and the California High Speed Rail Authority, boosts those estimates sharply.

It identifies six alternatives ranging from $803 million to almost $1.4 billion. It used what the study’s draft report says were conservative assumptions about land costs and the two railroads’ willingness to adjust their operations.

As the article makes clear, the CHSRA let Fresno officials know their wallets were not bottomless, and that the Authority would only be able to fund either a bypass around Fresno, or a route through the city center:

Assistant City Manager Bruce Rudd said city officials were warned that the authority might not be able to pay for both a local route through the city and an express route west of town, at least not in the system’s early years. After that, city officials decided that the local route, with a station in downtown Fresno, was a more important goal than the bypass.

“What they were saying was, ‘What is your preference?’ ” Rudd said. “And we said our preference is for a downtown station.”

In other words, Fresno made it clear they prefer HSR to go through their downtown and serve the city center with a downtown station. This is also the preference of Californians For High Speed Rail, which also endorses moving the Amtrak station from the BNSF route to the HSR station site on the other side of Fresno’s downtown.

There was some discussion in the maintenance hub thread from Sunday about whether Fresno’s offer to use $100 million from voter-approved funds intended to help pay for consolidation was legitimate. The Fresno Bee article suggests it is indeed legitimate:

That means the $100 million set aside in Measure C for rail consolidation could revert to its alternate use — building bridges to separate streets from one or both of the rail lines — or be diverted to another use, such as the effort to lure the high-speed rail system’s heavy maintenance yard to a site south of Fresno.

In other words, that money was earmarked for several possible uses – rail consolidation OR grade separations OR something like luring the maintenance hub. If rail consolidation is too expensive to accomplish, voters won’t want that money to just sit around. They rightly expect it to be used. So using it for the maintenance hub makes a lot of sense.

Rail consolidation is still an excellent idea. But it’s just too insurmountable an obstacle for HSR to accomplish, which after all has to meet other needs, including keeping costs as low as necessary.