Whining about upgrading existing track on a lightly traveled line, has got to be about the most lame excuse I've ever heard. Unless SMART is truly gilding the proverbial lily with their upgrades, it is shear nonsense. Maybe they just need to hire a competent contractor to upgrade the existing track to class 4. It ain't that hard with just a few trains a week.

Of course, being a public agency, and thus ignorant of what actually needs doing for class three (60mph passenger) or class four track (80mph); they probably have been flimflammed by some consultant into a total R.O.W. replacement, subgrade and all.

Now that would be more difficult and unnecessarily expensive. But taken in short enough segments, it could still be very easily interleaved in between the few trains per week that NCRA will be running. I once witnessed SP actually transpose 2000 feet of track (swap rails side to side) in a two hour work window between Amtrak trains. They made it look like a cakewalk. No trains were delayed. This sort of thing used to be done routinely.

Of course that did require some actual planning and forethought. So ya! Maybe SMART ain't smart enough to actually do that after all. More likely, they have a hidden (corrupt) agenda - being that they are all SCUMBAGS!

Uh, oops - I mean politicians.