California's long-delayed bullet train slated to run in the Central Valley by 2032, report says
Source: The Independent
Friday 22 August 2025 23:51 BST
California's long-delayed high-speed rail project could be operating in the Central Valley by 2032, but it is far short of securing the funding it needs to connect up north toward the San Francisco Bay Area and south toward Los Angeles, according to a report by officials released Friday.
It will cost roughly $87 billion to build between Gilroy, about 80 miles southeast of San Francisco, and Palmdale, about 37 miles north of Los Angeles, the High Speed Rail Authority's report says. That section is expected to start running in 2038.
“While challenges remain, so too does the potential to deliver a modern transportation system worthy of the state’s ambitions — one that reflects the scale, complexity, and promise of California itself,” Authority CEO Ian Choudri wrote in the report. “Let’s go build it.”
The project is designed to shuttle riders across nearly 500 miles between San Francisco and Los Angeles. When voters approved a proposition in 2008 to authorize a bond to fund a third of the project, the cost was estimated at $33 billion and was to have been up and running by 2020. It could now cost up to $128 billion to build, the authority estimated last year. Officials will release an updated estimate in a business report next year, authority spokesperson Micah Flores said in an email.
Read more: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/california-central-valley-los-angeles-sacramento-donald-trump-b2812820.html
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except it was not a train but a highway - one of several "roads to nowhere", with the one nicknamed "The Blue Route" (one of the earliest monikers for it), that was eventually designated a part of I-476.
Planning for it began in 1929 and some construction started in the '50s and '60s, where that stopped and started for another 30 or so years, with dead-ends cropping up continually over that period, as rights-of-way and environmental impacts were halting construction.
Eventually after 63 years, many court cases (including a SCOTUS rejection to hear them), and $600 million dollars, it was finally completed in December 1992. 
The long and colorful saga of the Blue Route
One of my BILs uses it extensively. I just go the old-fashioned way if I need to go somewhere near it.
