Posts Tagged ‘rail’

Has Trump Finally Killed The Train To Nowhere?

Thursday, July 17th, 2025

Longtime readers will remember the Texas vs. California updates I did for many years, until the bad news out of California became such a torrent that it took too long to compile them. One reoccurring feature in those posts were updates on the “high speed rail to nowhere”

Now comes word that the Trump Administration may have finally driven a stake through its heart.

President Donald Trump and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy canceled the $4 billion funding meant for California’s high-speed rail train….

The plan started 16 years ago. California has spent $15 billion but never built one high-speed track.

Duffy’s press release noted that the “$135 billion projected total cost of the project could buy every San Francisco and LA resident nearly 200 roundtrip flights between the cities.”

Trump wrote on Truth Social:

To the Law abiding, Tax paying, Hardworking Citizens of the United States of America, I am thrilled to announce that I have officially freed you from funding California’s disastrously overpriced, “HIGH SPEED TRAIN TO NOWHERE.” This boondoggle, led by the incompetent Governor of California, Gavin Newscum, has cost Taxpayers Hundreds of Billions of Dollars, and we have received NOTHING in return except Cost Overruns. The Railroad we were promised still does not exist, and never will. This project was Severely Overpriced, Overregulated, and NEVER DELIVERED. Thanks to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, not a SINGLE penny in Federal Dollars will go towards this Newscum SCAM ever again. This was an ill-conceived and unnecessary project, and a total waste of Taxpayer money — But no more!

Duffy started an investigation into the train in February, reviewing two grants:

  • $929 million Cooperative Agreement from 2010
  • $3.07 billion Cooperative Agreement from last year

    • In June, the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) told the California High-Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA) that the review “identified a trail of project delays, mismanagement, waste, and skyrocketing costs.”

    “This is California’s fault. Governor Newsom and the complicit Democrats have enabled this waste for years. Federal dollars are not a blank check – they come with a promise to deliver results. After over a decade of failures, CHSRA’s mismanagement and incompetence has proven it cannot build its train to nowhere on time or on budget,” declared Duffy. “It’s time for this boondoggle to die. President Trump and I will always fight to ensure your tax dollars only go to projects that accomplish great, big, beautiful things.”

    It became very clear, very early on that California’s high speed rail would never be built, but the one party blue state insisted on pushing on in order to continue raking off the graft and featherbedding, as well as an unshakable belief in anthropocentric global warming and a desire to take the proles out of their hated cars and pickup trucks and cram them into trains so as to better control their movements. The project should have been killed a long, long time ago.

    At least now, the only taxpayer money California’s government will be wasting is that of its own taxpayers.

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    Posted in Democrats, Waste and Fraud | 5 Comments »

    Ukraine Hits Kerch Strait Bridge Again

    Tuesday, June 3rd, 2025

    Tons of news about the Russo-Ukrainian War this week, including Ukraine hitting the Kerch Strait Bridge again, this time with underwater charges.

    Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) says it has managed to strike the Crimea bridge with underwater explosives following an operation lasting “several months”.

    The SBU said its agents had “mined the supports” of the bridge with 1,100kg of explosives which “severely damaged” the bottom level of the supports.

    The “first explosive device” was activated early Tuesday morning “without any civilian casualties”, the SBU added. The information shared by the SBU could not be immediately verified.

    Russian media initially said the bridge was briefly closed to traffic but that it had reopened by 10:00 local time (08:00 GMT).

    However, later in the day, local authorities warned the bridge was closed again.

    Unconfirmed reports on social media said more explosions had occurred around the structure.

    The official Telegram channel sharing operational updates about the bridge said: “We ask those on the bridge and in the inspection zone to remain calm and follow the instructions of the transport security officers.”

    Russia has not yet commented on Tuesday morning’s attack but Russian military bloggers speculated that an underwater drone, rather than explosive, had hit a protective barrier.

    The SBU said its director, Lieutenant General Vasyl Malyuk, personally supervised the operation and coordinated its planning.

    In a Telegram post, it quoted Malyuk as saying Ukraine had hit the Crimea bridge in 2022 and 2023 and was therefore “continuing this tradition under water.”

    Coverage of the 2022 strike can be found here, and the 2023 strike was covered here.

    “No illegal Russian facilities have a place on the territory of our state,” Malyuk said.

    “Therefore, the Crimean Bridge is an absolutely legitimate target, especially considering that the enemy used it as a logistical artery to supply its troops.”

    Suchomimus has footage:

  • “Ukraine reports this one took several months. During that period of time SBU agents of Ukraine place mines along the supports of the Crimean bridge. Today the device was detonated. The underwater supports are reported as being severely damaged at the bottom level.”
  • “The supports being structurally compromised and destroyed, as seems to be the case here, means that the bridge is, to use a technical term, ‘knackered.'”
  • “The bridge is still standing. It has not been downed.” But it has been structurally weakened.
  • Current reports suggest that it was the already-weakened railway span that was hit.
  • The mines may have been planted under the guise of carrying out maintenance work on the bridge.
  • “From the sounds of it, the mines were actually buried to reach these supporting poles.”
  • The speed with which the detonation video was released suggests Ukraine has access to Russia’s video surveillance system.

    • It’s been a big week for Ukrainian special operations. Some members of Russian counterintelligence must be jumping out of their skins about now…

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    Posted in Foreign Policy, Military, video | 11 Comments »

    HS2: UK’s £100 Billion Rail To Nowhere

    Thursday, October 26th, 2023

    I’ve long documented the failures of California’s still unbuilt high speed rail, and now a video from Simon Whistler (yeah, him) covers a similar doomed British high speed rail project:

  • “Even in a country used to paying absurd prices for everything from houses to a pint of beer, it was still a pretty eye-watering figure. After initially being projected to cost under £40 billion in 2012, Britain’s second high-speed rail project, HS2, was recently calculated to be facing a price tag closer to £100 billion.”
  • “Just the first phase alone the 34 miles connecting London and Birmingham is in danger of becoming one of the most expensive railways ever built.”
  • It was originally supposed to pay for itself by offering high speed connections between London and three English industrial cities in the north: Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield. But ballooning costs forced the cancellation of those two line extensions.
  • “All rationale for HS2 vanished, leaving the UK with a multi-billion pound bill just to slightly reduce travel time between London and Birmingham.”
  • HS1 was the 62 mile high speed rail line from London to the channel tunnel. It only cost three times the estimated price.
  • One reason it was considered a success: “It had added significant extra capacity to commuter lines running into London from Kent, as much as 40% extra in peak times.”
  • In the dying days Gordon Brown’s Labor government in 2010, Transport Secretary and rail freak Lord Adonis published a white paper outlining his Utopian high speed rail vision for Britain. Unfortunately, incoming conservative George Osborne had a soft spot for flashy infrastructure projects.
  • “Neither Adonis nor Osborne nor anybody else could have envisaged a budget that would soon balloon wildly out of control.” Actually, I suspect anyone familiar with the many failures of high speed rail projects in the U.S. could indeed have envisaged it.
  • By 2015 it was up to £55 billion.
  • By 2019 it was £71 billion, or over £22,000 for every UK household.
  • After 2020 and Flu Manchu, it was over £100 billion, and PM Rishi Sunak pulled the plug on everything but the London to Birmingham stretch, which was still going to cost £53 billion, or £396 million per mile.
  • “The fast train from Euston Station to Birmingham New Street takes around 1 hour and 40 minutes. All H2 will do will shave 25 to 35 minutes off that.”
  • All infrastructure projects in the UK cost more than their equivalents in continental Europe. “The insane costs associated with planning applications in the UK, something that you could see in the proposed London Themes Crossing, which recently spent £267 million just on planning paperwork.”
  • There’s a ton of NIMBYism along the route, forcing them to spend billions building rail tunnels despite it being perfectly feasible to build it overland.

    Between London and Birmingham lies the sort of gentile English landscape that people who’ve never visited the UK believe the whole country looks like, a green swath of rolling hills, country lanes and posh blokes wearing tweed. Unfortunately, it turns out that the sort of people who live in this landscape hate the idea of London politicians plonking a fancy new train line right in the middle of it.

  • “Some countries like Japan can do tunneling at a reasonable cost. The UK is not among that group.”
  • Then there’s the well-paid army of white collar consultants, which will be familiar to any observer of California’s high speed rail project. “Among them were 40 employees paid more than £150,000 a year, and chief executives with higher salaries than any other public official in Britain.” Nice work if you can get it.
  • “In July of 20123 the government’s own infrastructure watchdog branded HS2 as unachievable saying it could not be delivered in its current form.”
  • The kicker: HS2 may never make it to central London, as building there is too expensive. “Rather than terminating at Euston Station in central London, HS2 would now end at Old Oak Common,” a suburban station, where they’re expected to catch local connections. “The new line will cost of tens of billions get you from Birmingham to central London less quickly than you can do it at the moment.”
  • But they’ve already spent £40 million for two top-of-the-line boring machines from Germany to dig the Old Oak Common to Euston segment. Current plans are to bury them in hope they might be used later.
  • “Hearing about stuff like this, it is tempting to wonder if, just maybe, the UK shouldn’t have listened to the results of the 2006 independent review into high speed rail written by Rod Edington before HS1 was even finished it concluded that highspeed rail simply isn’t worth it in Britain.”
  • “The money would be better spent on less sexy improvements, like line electrification and improving local bus services.”

    • And we all know why they’d never go that route: There simply aren’t enough opportunities for bureaucratic empire building and graft…

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    Posted in Military, Regulation, Uncategorized, unions, video, Waste and Fraud | 20 Comments »