CE is right about the level of training in civil and transportation systems engineering in general. We don't have the depth of professional talent we need to develop to rebuild America's aging infrastructure and/or provide new future infrastructure like our parent and grand parents had.

Yes, we have historic personages, but they're dead and aren;t muchuse around the office these days.
Yes, our freight railroads do have an aging cadre of good engineering staff, but not so much in the area of "new" systems, but rather, resigned to very incremental solutions, not well versed in large new railway construction.

We are also having this problem in areas like traffic, highway construction, bridge construction, and many other civil works (water, electrical girds, and flood control.

There are numerous individual of a high caliber that I've met who are trying to fill this gap, but this talent pool coming out of college has been competing with higher wages and more interesting challenges in field like electrical and aerospace engineering.

This "education gap" is the same for planning, where I can get a good supply of "planning majors" (environmental, urban, and/or land use) by the thousands. Who are all to often by and large untrained in any aspect of transportation, bereft of basic economics and uable to to even basic cost benefit analysis, and in some cases not even able to do basic geography, like interpret spatial data, or read a map. And, then there have been my "keeper" who fall into the other third......

Unfortunately, it is not the lack of good engineering talent that has been the problem with the CHSRA fiasco. Rather, it has been the surplus of bad talent, more interested in pandering to politicians, steering contracts, and generating change orders, to cover the waste, fraud, and abuse of the taxpayers by a small cligue who have systematically sold a gold plated design and a flawed concept, to support a business model based on political cronyism, without regard to public needs or best professional practised. Maybe, this is why so many qualified CE's and other professionals and firms that I personally know in the posublis and private sector have shied away from involvement in this troubled project?

Jeff Morales has recruited some good talent fianlly for the cHSRA, whcih had no real staff, supervising questionable consultants. He needs to show some results soon, which indicate that real needs are getting cost effective solutions. Rather than a bloated trough for unsupervised contractors. Or else, this project will be terminated by angry voters, who do really seem to want a good rail passenger system for California, but still posess enough sense to know a costly, unecessary, and/or corrupt boondoggle when they see it?