> To all of those who support a responsible public role in providing for a cost effective
> investment in rail services passenger or freight to meet real needs, but oppose blatant
> public waste, bloat, corruption, and foolishness this is actually good news.

In my mind, shared r.o.w. is the mother of all no-brainers! Whether it is built and administered by private enterprise or by the public being completely irrelevant. Just look at what shared open access r.o.w. has done for the trucking industry. But any time public funding gets involved, the resulting assets must remain in the public domain and under public control.

Conversely however, forking over public assets to exclusive private interests so they can then just improve their own profitability, while thumbing the nose at the public; is indeed the mother of all stupidities! But California has already given away that store! - on a number of projects.

Seeing the CHSRA entertain the concept of shared R.O.W. indeed sounds good, but let's turn our memories back on. That is hardly a new idea to them. Previous plans along those lines have been categorically rejected by the boobs running the Union Pacific. As also was BART's attempt to find a less expensive r.o.w, than down the middle of a freeway in East Contra Costa.

Between UP's threats of legal action to stop CHSRA from even planning such shared usages, and its absurd demands on BART, it was obvious that UP was not willing to share anything at reasonable cost, if at all. UP was not even willing to share a 100' wide r.o.w. along the parallel unused single track line! Kept demanding the sublimely ridiculous in return (things like double tracking their unused line for them); causing BART negotiators to finally just give up.

Sadly, that has nearly tripled the cost to build e-BART, as now a huge share of the cost of rebuilding that freeway to accommodate the r.o.w., comes out of the rail bonds set aside for eBART. Net result? - less than half the originally promised and planned miles will actually get built! Nice touch Uncle Pete!


As to the notion of building the HSR through the Tejon canyon or anywhere near there, and then sharing it with freight railroads - a month long blinding blizzard in hell is more likely than any usage. Whereas an electrified high horse-power passenger train could manage the inevitably steep grades uphill (not so easy downhill at any real speed); no freight train trying that would ever come close to being economically competitive. So uncompetitive is it, that Europe has discovered it less expensive to build multi-billion dollar 30 mile long freight tunnels, than it is to haul the stuff up and over the top.

Besides, what transportation market could possibly be tapped to use it? The big stUPid has in the last couple of decades, already lost virtually 90% of the LA basin to Pacific Northwest traffic to trucks. And SP had already lost 99% of the LA to Bay Area traffic before that. And ain't none of it ever commin' back - folks!

Especially over a cost prohibitive freight route, while nearby much less expensive routes (Coast Line), already lie virtually idle.