Rail Bail

The train to nowhere os officially dead:

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy threatened Wednesday to pull federal grants for California’s High-Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA) after it spent nearly $7 billion in taxpayer funds over a decade and a half without laying a single foot of track. In a 310-page report, Duffy detailed the missed deadlines and stretched budget for the long-running project — and gave the Golden State’s high-speed rail office until July 11 to respond or get around $4 billion in additional grants cut off. “This report exposes a cold, hard truth: CHSRA has no viable path to complete this project on time or on budget,” he said. Originally passed as a ballot initiative in 2008, the 800-mile rail line was supposed to be completed in two phases on a $33 billion budget by 2020, with a main line connecting San Francisco with Los Angeles and branches stretching north to Sacramento and south to San Diego. .... “We don’t want to invest in boondoggles,” Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, told Fox News. “I want to see high-speed rail in America and why it can’t be built within, you know, time frames that work for the people that invest in these projects makes no sense to me.” The scale of the high-speed train route has been chipped away since the federal government first gave its support to the idea in 2009, the report noted: Initially, the vision for the project was a rail line that would whisk riders from the Bay Area to Los Angeles in less than three hours on some of the fastest trains in the world.

That train won't run anymore...