Strangly enough, not inspired by this thread but my sugar mama taking me to Vegas for the weekend.
Why is there no high speed train running along I-15 from LA to Vegas? Have there been attempts before? You would think there would be a ton of $ in Vegas for private financing for the train. Plus with the days of $25 commuter flights gone, there would be a ton of demand for it. Put stops in San Diego (maybe), Ontario, and Barstow (maybe) and shuttles at the Vegas terminus.
You’d think it would pay for itself in a heartbeat. Use solar collectors to help power the train, use the existing right-of-way, and you could be in business tomorrow. Add a club car or two and the weekend gambler could be hammered by Victorville. the perfect mark upon arriving in Sin City.
Adam Carolla has been pissed off about this for years.
If this is the case it should be a good investment for a consortium of Las Vegas casino owners, who would be the beneficiaries of such a train.
2-1 says that they already looked into it and decided the risk was too great.
Why use the most expensive source of electricity available, when your destination has the cheapest electricity on the planet? Hydroelectric, like from Hoover Dam, is much, much cheaper than solar.
Yeah, but Boulder Dam is just about tapped out, megawattage-wise. Unless they build another dam, and they dare not, then solar is the way to at least augment the power requirements. It is, after all, desert the entire way.
It is not called Boulder Dam.
I refuse to grant Hoover any recognition whatsoever as a president. It was Boulder Dam when my mom taught there back in the 40s, so Boulder Dam it will always be to me.
Especially if they could have a casino car.
There did use to be a regular Amtrak train, but that hasn’t been the case in years. Which is odd, because when you look at San Diego to L.A. and, to a lesser extent, north up to Santa Barbara, they can hardly put enough trains on to meet the demand, and then you have the growing Metrolink system. All this certainly makes it appear that a good many people are willing to use trains, so why not put one between the major population center of the Western U.S. and one of the major tourist destinations. These days so many passenger trains use Union Station that Amtrak and Metrolink are having a hard time scheduling them that the track configuration, which forces trains to pull in and back out, is becoming a liability and the railroads and station owner are trying to implement a “run-through tracks” project, which would allow trains to pull in and continue out without having to turn around.
Hell, there’s even a Las Vegas bound Amtrak bus that meets the train at Bakersfield.
One possibility is that people want to be free to move around Las Vegas and there is inadequate public transportation there, so they drive their cars.
That’s why they built the Las Vegas monorail. If they extend that out to the airport and then downtown, the rail link becomes a no-brainer.
There’s a MagLev project that’s been slowly getting off the ground for a number of years now, to connect LA to Vegas.
Sorry, but that’s just nuts.
It was called Boulder Dam because of a very petty act by the Roosevelt administration, which Harry Truman, a man of considerably better nature, corrected when he assumed office. Truman was also smart enough and decent enough to tap Hoover’s extensive experience in postwar humanitarian aid when World War II was winding down, whereas Roosevelt had refused all along Hoover’s offers to help.
You can call it Boulder Dam if you want, but I’d like to think you’re as decent and forgiving a sort as Harry Truman was.
True, but high-speed rail would be competing with air travel as much as with people deciding to drive on their own. Air travelers have to rent cars anyway, depending on circumstances. I wouldn’t say Las Vegas is one of the places where you have to have a car. True, the public transit’s not good, but if you’re like most tourists you’re just there to hang out by the pool and gamble at your hotel, and others along the Strip, and you don’t need a car for that. It’s not like L.A., where you really do have to have a car if you’re going to see anything worth seeing.
Maybe it was blocked by a counter-consortium of Las Vegas Auto-Pawn shylocks.
Why would anyone want to put a train in between Vegas and LA? First of all, unless you build from scratch, the current rail lines are not passenger friendly. Second of all, you are talking about going over at least two major passes (Cajon pass and the one outside of Barstow with a name I forget at present - Halloran?), not to mention the summit you go over just prior to dropping down into Nevada. To make a train worth the effort, it would have to be a high-speed train, and that’s talking some significant cost.
Easier just to drive or fly.
Building a rail line would have a high overhead, but once in place it would be cheaper and faster, and possibly more efficient, than either flying or driving.
I want a high-speed line from the Bay Area to LA, maybe they could tack it on to that.
Also the official name of the dam was never changed, even under FDR.
Actually, I seem to recall that it’s being opposed by California-based Indian gaming casinos, who are raking in a tidy sum from those who don’t feel like like braving the drive or fighting the nightmare of LAX, and have realized that the inside of one casino pretty much looks the same as all the others. High-speed rail could talk them into going back to Nevada.