^^^
Great find!
I am surprised that they are going to build within the I-15 corridor. I knew that their route mainly paralleled the freeway but I did not know they would actually building within the state DOT land. Furthermore, in California he said they would be building in the median of the freeway, which... I have mixed feelings about. I dislike medians as corridors for rail expansion, but the median of I-15 is very wide and perhaps this can be an exception. In Nevada they will be on the east side of the freeway but still within NDOT ROW, and now the new station location in Las Vegas makes so much more sense.
I am underwhelmed by their plans for the Las Vegas terminal. I hope that they are planning much more but just didn't want to show too much too soon - although the man did say that they wouldn't be building as big as they did in Miami, whatever that means.
Electric trains with 45 minute headways changes everything. 180 mph is also very good - that's 290 km/h which is a respectable top speed among HSR world wide. It is also suspicious... I wonder if they plan on buying copies of the
Avalia Liberty trainset (next-gen Acela) from Alstom? They share the same top speed, and the tilting feature would probably be needed if trains are going to be running in the median of a much slower road. Amtrak is set to receive the last of their sets in 2022, which means that Alstom could keep up their manufacturing run and deliver a few more sets to Virgin in 2023.
But with electrification, it becomes much more expensive to extend train service to Los Angeles Union Station. I guess it wouldn't be impossible for trains to use the Amtrak route (San Bernardino - Fullerton - LA) so long as Virgin wasn't scared of stringing catenary over BNSF's 3-track mainline. It would be kind of cool they could coordinate with Metrolink's recent proposal to use HSR money to electrify the route from LA to Anaheim.
But honestly I see this going in one of two directions:
1)Connect Victorville to San Bernardino and build a large terminal there, possibly on the empty land
just east of the old depot where passengers could connect to Metrolink trains to LA. There are two Metrolink lines, one to Union Station and the other to Anaheim and Oceanside, so it would be easy to access via transit. Metrolink to LA from San Bernardino takes about
90 minutes. And of course, San Bernardino is well connected to the rest of LA Valley by freeway. The only two downsides would be that electrified tracks would need to be built through Cajon pass, which in a
previous post I proved would not be too expensive, and it would also limit their ability to extend to Los Angeles, since there is a huge urban area between the two points.
2) Extend to Palmdale and wait for the HSR to materialize in the far future. This scenario seems more likely to me. The Metrolink connection at Palmdale takes longer than San Bernadino to reach LA (
2 hours) and there is only one freeway connection to Palmdale from LA and it is far less central to the population center than San Bernardino... but this extension would be cheaper, and in the future would connect into the HSR system for a much faster trip to LA.
In my perfect future I want both options to be used - first a terminal in San Bernardino, then when HSR comes along build to Palmdale and run two separate services to LA. But we all know the future isn't perfect.
Anyway, thanks digitallagasse for bringing this information to my attention!