(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 554: Getting California High Speed Rail Done

This week we’re back live for another show from Manny’s in the Mission featuring Streetsblog SF editor Roger Rudick interviewing California High Speed Rail Authority CEO Ian Choudri. They chat about reducing costs, systems in other countries, and take questions from the audience.

You can listen to this episode first at Streetsblog USA, or find it in our hosting archive.

Below is a full AI generated unedited transcript of the episode:

I realized I have interviewed four CEOs of the high-speed rail authority. Uh, this is, which I think is all of them actually. Back from R of Fan Arc? Yeah, I think so, yeah. Okay, so let’s jump in. So the governor signed, and I have to write the numbers down, SB eight 40 and AB 1207 got the two right ones for cap and trade?

Yes. Okay. Given that, I think the first question that everybody would like to hear answered is, if we don’t get any more money from the feds, which is seems like a possibility, and that’s where we’re at, what can we do with that money? Where are we gonna be? Let’s see, in 10

Okay. We were looking, oh, and I don’t know if you read our business plan update report that we put forward, I think in, uh, three months ago. And we laid out the roadmap of what we can do with what type of funding commitment we need from the state. Governor supported our approach and we got this 1,000,000,020 years.

Abruptly, that’s what we got. While we were doing that, we were also engaging with the private sector and we were asking the same question to them, Hey, if we get 20 or 40 or 50 or a hundred billion what is that you can invest as private sector? And we started that in January this year, and we got the responses back.

So roughly we are talking about. 20 billion plus what we currently have, plus what private sector can invest the amount of dollars that can get us the Central Valley section built and then get us out of Central Valley to population centers. We are optimizing our cost for the infrastructure, we are looking at ways to get the train moving and get to the places where we want to get to as fast as we can.

And so. My view is that with the amount of money we got committed today, we need to revisit that next year as well, but we have enough to go build as far as we can. Starting n so end of November this year we are purchasing the rail. That would be the high speed tracks. And then July, uh, June, July next year, we have contractor who will be laying tracks.

So the big news is everything now is on track.

Now we are looking at ways. To improve regional systems where we can invest sooner, like we electrified Caltrain, right? So now you have electrified Caltrain system running quietly through the neighborhoods and is a beautiful ride. And California high speed rail invested in that close to a billion in today’s dollar.

Then now we are looking at Southern California. What can we do there? To improve Metrolink service that is in there while we are busy doing construction in Central Valley and trying to get to Gilroy, San Jose, San Francisco. I used to live here and I’ll tell you this, that it’s not about a thousand mile worth of track getting built overnight in your garage, and then you take it with a bunch of.

You know, helicopters and drop it there and say, all right, this is high speed. We are done now. It takes time, it takes effort, it takes national commitment, which we don’t have. So state commitment, which we do, so we are able to build it and run the trains 20, 32, 33 in the sections that we are currently constructing.

I would like, which we said in our business plan that we released two months ago or three months ago. That if we are given all the jurisdictional authority, the powers to get the utilities out the way, the right of way issues, the judges issues, the zoning issues then and the funding, we can finance it and get it built by 2039 connecting San Jose and Palmdale to Metrolink and Merced Bakersfield.

We just need somebody to say. People with the power of the purse saying yes to it so we can deliver.

Has the state of California finally realized like we just can’t deal with the Feds anymore. We’re gonna have to do this on our

It’s a public infrastructure project. You don’t play with it by flip flopping every four years. It’s just not serious business. No one wants to commit to it. No contractor wants to work in an environment, but they mobilize resources and thousands of labor and workers and then came to find out, it’s like, oh, well we can do it for three years and then no funding.

We are gonna close the tab. That’s just not the way to build. Look at the interstate highway grid. When was that initiative taken? In fifties administration, so and so now we are what did we ever ask about, have you read an article about like, what was the cost and budget? Do you read about high speed rail?

Had a budget when there was no plan, no engineering, no alignment? Oh yeah. We hear it every day. 38 billion and is now cost overrun. I’m like 38 of what? We didn’t even know where it was going back then, so we somehow knew it’s gonna cost us 38. What we never had an understanding of where it’s gonna be built and how are we gonna build it.

What laws need to change in order for us to become efficient. None of that was there. Now, interested, highway grid is close to what, 2 trillion, 1.8, 1.7 trillion, and no one talks about it, but we talk about it this program every day. So we are the, the one that loved the most.

We, I know we talk about all the freeway widenings and all the RAMP projects and everything else, and the right. The billions of dollars we spend that never gets questioned. What is it, 37? The, the freeway that there is gonna be underwater in a few years. Yes. That they’re building it anyway, and the governor signed that too.

Anyway, um, you know, I I, because of the, uh, audience questions that, uh, Manny brought up, I, I thought maybe we should back up to something a little more basic. Can I see a show of hands? How many people in the audience have ridden a high-speed rail in a, in another country? Oh wow. Great. So most people, great.

Okay. So I mean, maybe this is something we can both talk about. ’cause I lived overseas as well. I used to use Eurostar around the same time you were working on it, actually. Yeah. And the question about, you know, what’s the advantage of taking a high-speed train over a, a short haul flight or an intercity flight?

I mean, what is it to your view? Like, why, why do we really wanna build this? I know.

In Denver, I’m nine hours into it. Yeah, sometimes seven hours into it. And I never file a lawsuit every time that happens. But God, like if you say high speed rail, if it is delayed by two minutes, you are in violation of this law or that law. Let’s get real how we are traveling today and we never complain.

Now think about if you walk in and anyone who have traveled in Italy, France, or Germany or UK on high speed. You walk in to the platform while you’re buying your ticket, and then you find your train number and then your seat number while you are looking for which platform you have to go to. Three minutes later, you are in the train.

Yeah. And then you sit there, you open your laptop, and you’re like, all right I’m gonna do my work and it’s gonna be very fast, 350 kilometer per hour train. And I’m doing that while I’m saying, okay, I’m bored. I just want go walk and see my friend over there. And have a chat with him, or we meet in that bar car.

Now compare that with your seven hour experience from here to Denver and tie it into the seat and then yelled at, uh, if you try to move because the sign is on. Because that’s the way we travel and we never question ourself why we have no high speed rail and we have been talking about it. Since seventies and we are visiting every country that have high speed rail.

We visit, we come back. It’s like, you know what? We should do it. But we never,

So they built some trains. They we’re, we’re almost now with the newest Ella sets. On the East coast getting to the point that we wanted to hit. I’ll take an exception to that,

Yeah. Forever. Just Pennsylvania Railroad back in the day. And we are gonna connect it and we are gonna run high speed and 260 plus billion into it. The maximum speed we got is at one 60 for a 2, 1 60 is the testing speed? Yeah. But the tracks and structures would not allow you to go over 1 25 and that’s the net result of our investment in high speed, 260 billion over a hundred years, and it’s still not there.

This program that we are looking at in California have spent 14 billion. Only today and have 120 mile civil construction done. And we are ready to lay tracks, um, by the end of next year. And then we are able to say, Hey, if we spend another 30, 40 billion we can connect to Gilroy. Why Gilroy, of course, is because Caltran is already there and we electrify that.

So look at the proportions of the investments we did on other places. Compared to what we are doing here, and I really appreciate the governor, our local legislature here, federal park aside for now, and then look at it and say, with that amount of money, we are gonna be connecting central value where there are eight point some million people living to Bay Area, to Silicon Valley where I to live.

And then further down the road to la. With a very little investment compared to our defense budget now. And I can talk about like a lot of other things we spend money on.

Absolutely vital to the economy of the Northeast. If the Northeast corridor shuts down, basically the economy shuts down on the East Coast. And I feel like your project more than high-speed rail is sort of an economic engine for California, that you’re connecting all the cities and giving us sort of a, a, a west coast northeast corridor.

To that point, you had mentioned actually that you’re talking about running freight at night on it as well.

And I came outta UK and then went on the French side and as a field engineer, and I didn’t even know how to look at the drawing, uh, but I was in the tunnel than, uh, they were digging from both side.

So we were under

Geez. Like some, I gave them too much credit. Very close. Mm. Okay. And then we had to pull back the machines and then buddy them in under the ocean bed because there was no way to take out these machines. And so we’re like, all right it, we’ll see how it goes. And, uh, and it worked. Yeah. The French talking to the Brits in the French English, and then the Brits talking to them in English, French.

It all worked and we were able to do it. Now, look what they did after that private sector came in and they were like, well, how do we utilize this corridor that, uh, got built for passenger rail? So then in the day, they’re running passengers between two countries and the economies are are there, of both countries that are very strong.

They’re like, okay, what else can we do with this system? So during the night. They’re moving everything they can from Amazon, uh, delivery services to cars that they’re selling the rowers to France and the PS to, to uk. They’re doing all of that trade during the night, every night, uh, for years and years and years.

Why? Because simple concept, you are moving passengers during the day. It’s a highway. Do you really wanna shut it down and curfew it during the night? Now that was the

They should not get their money back by other sources. While we are saying, I’m saying pay back as fast as you can, what you borrowed from taxpayers. And in our plan you will see 2075 is the break human point. Where the system starts paying back and we are done if the power of the purse, people give us what we need.

2075 or 76 is the time when every penny people paid, gets paid back from the system. After that, you are just. Generating revenue then, which is gravy after that. Yes. Then after you’re giving back into the general fund. For other improvements.

Their spine. Think of, for us it would be LA to San Francisco, but they made so much money off of them and off of the adjacent real estate that they were able to expand the systems even further. So you could see we’re already looking at connecting to Vegas, but you could see maybe you’d get high speed rail to Denver or.

I don’t know where else, but Phoenix, Arizona. Phoenix. Arizona’s an obvious one. Yeah. And Washington. From there you go to Tucson, Washington State from, yeah, from there you go to Washington High

This is how Japan started it. 1959 when they started it. They the next town, which was about 34 miles or 35 miles away.

That was a small farm town and the population was very small. Once the high speed got connected and went through that town today, it’s a metropolis just transformative stuff that happened because people were able to live in that town and work in Tokyo.

It just made their life like very affordable. Yeah. And so, yeah, that’s the part that you’re talking about. This is not just a train corridor, what I call, it’s like it is a corridor of opportunities and train is one thing, but there are other things that will happen through it. Like it happened in Italy, Japan, France, Taiwan, Hong Kong.

So

It, if you travel in style, you take the train.

Yeah.

Margaret Thatcher didn’t want to invest in high speed rail to the coast, so the train used to go through the tunnel. We’d go through France at 200 miles an hour, go through the tunnel, and then come to the surface and just join sort of the regular commuter train. So it was going 80 miles an hour or 90 miles an hour, which is.

Fast by American standards. By European standards. It’s a slug. Yeah. But I, I have such clear memories of being on it and coming up from the darkness of the tunnel and the train would slow down and it felt like you could get out and walk at that point in the uk. And I would just listen to the Brits grumble about how embarrassing it was.

Oh, I can’t believe we, this is the kind of tracks that we build here. Like what, what the hell is wrong with our country? Why are the French showing us up like this? And just the political momentum built so that, I mean. Building the high speed one link it. It was almost a GI at that point. And I wonder in the United States, once people were exposed to it where they’re not why are we spending billions of dollars building more Amtrak when they actually see what we’re talking about and experience it?

Is that gonna sort of open the floodgates of support?

It took me about 14 and a half, 15 hours. Cause I had to drive her car. And so then I looked at Amtrak’s schedule. If I take, and I told her, it’s like, Hey, put your stuff in the Amtrak and then take that train. It was two and a half days to get here.

I mean, they’re this stuff, these tracks, people to think we’re exaggerating when we say that. A lot of this was dug by hand and dynamite and, um, it’s the time of mistreated Chinese laborers climbing on the side of the hills and, and getting killed, blowing up mountains. Like true. All of that is, that’s still the right of ways that we’re using.

They’re moving 578 million people on their rail network every year, and look at the Amtrak number, how much they’re moving. Yeah. So for the entire country? Yeah, for a country

National government is behind it, provinces are behind it, and people value it. Taxpayers want to spend money on that because they know that this works. So it’s a matter of, for us making a decision. If we say all yes, which is what we got this time when the legislators say, Hey, 20 billion, let’s go for it.

See the results, and then you will see the momentum that people will be like, I want more of it. ’cause this makes sense when you get in the train in three minutes and you get out of the train. In four minutes and then your next ride is right there. Scooter or Uber or way more whatever you wanna use is all there, right there.

No, it was about we need to connect all these states. We, since then, we never took another initiative that, oh, we need to connect high speed systems in interconnecting all our states. We never did that. We keep talking about it. I mean, you see a lot of maps that come out from different, uh, associations and organizations, but it takes more than mapping, so we are gonna show rest of the country that here is how you actually do it. That’s what I’m doing. I’m like, okay, that’s build one. Run the trains, let the people decide if they want to build more off it, and then other states can learn. Our program is impacting. More than 27 other states simply by construction, engineering, materials, materials, labor, commodities and then more when we will build trains will be manufactured somewhere else, not in California.

Steel will be produced in five different states, aluminum, copper cables, concrete aggregates. They’re all coming from. More than 27 different states. Uh, yes, we can say California is going crazy. Oh, they want to do this crazy stuff. Everybody else is benefiting red or blue states. It doesn’t really matter.

Can you talk about that a little bit? Sure I in as lay terms as possible?

Let’s build it to a grade that is not that steep. And so we are gonna do it as flat as we can. While that’s fun if you are in the desert. But if you are going through the hacha and the checkup pass it is very quickly you have to realize. I cannot stay flat. I have to go through these mountains and what’s the most maximum grade I can use when the trains electrified?

Can run through it at a very high speed. Oh, we can go up to 3.5%, not 1.5. And so when that decision was made to make it a little higher, because Europe is doing it, Japan has been doing it, tried it, tested it, working let’s not reinvent do that. That eliminated about 60, 65, 70% of the tunnels that we had to do.

And that’s billions of dollars.

And so we fixed it. Uh, it took us four months to realize that this is a big mistake and improve the cost structure. When we put our plan out, we said we saved 14 billion. Optimizing cost by changing design standards and criteria, bringing them up to par with the European and the Japanese.

We are not saying that this is just made up stuff. This is real stuff. You have to tunnel 16 miles and now you have to turn only three, and that’s just because of correct. Standards are being used. That’s what we’re doing now. Yeah.

And I, I even back then, I would marvel when I’d look at the tracks and you could see them kind of, I mean, not quite like this, but a lot more than you’d see in the US ’cause the trains are just very light and very powerful. You can do it take, take

Or going towards the mountains, uh, in bologna you are going through tunnels, tunnels and tunnels for a very long time, but grates are maintained. And then when you are coming out, you’re going over highways and you can see it’s like, oh, the bridge goes up like that and goes on the, so 4% grades and they optimized infrastructure costs and that’s what we are doing now.

I think just for political support. No, we are doing it here. Yeah. Do you know, how do you go from San

That’s CSX or, or the Caltrain right away for that matter. But

So I brought my phone out, not to check my messages, but yeah we’re in q and a time. Thank you. Manny, do you have a, uh, it

Struggling to get ours off the map and I appreciate all the efforts to make that, uh, a winning struggle. And I appreciate you being head of the struggle. I want to know, do you find any synergies and ideas to help jumpstart our efforts here? Like is there some way to help. Succeed in the Northeast to help us get our, is there some way to get Bright Line success going to Vegas be a jumpstarter for us to get the real will and the real ability to get our going.

We talked, you talked a bit about how if all of these magic things line up, we could get there by what do we do to make any of those magic things happen and what can we leverage that might work?

So reason is simple. We found when I came on board that what we were doing for the last 10, 12 years, 15 years. We could change and do differently and put a, our head of a private sector on us and say we should do it better than what we were doing before. So what happened here is Acela in Northeast have a challenge that is not about the train.

Can you push the pedal and can go fast? It’s about. The geography and the corridor, the way it is set with all the kinks and curves and so you buy a high speed train, but you want to run it on a very curvy road, then the train is not the problem. The problem is your road is not straight enough to run it the highest speed.

So that’s the Acela issue there in the Northeast on Bright Line. Look, great investment plan. 2008. Nine 10, uh, change hands from somebody to Bright Line investors, and they’re our friends and we are working with them to interconnect between high desert corridor and high speed rail. So people from San Francisco can go all the way to Vegas by changing.

One seat or two which compared to airline travel, you change five before you get to your destination. So let’s get real. Why this high speed train have to come all the way to your backyard? No, no one does it. So how can we do it better is already in place for us, is not inspirational or some magic trick for us to say, Hey, if you check all these seven things.

Then we can deliver it in 20, 38, 39. They have, the legislature have taken the first step by allocating significant amount of funds at the state level. What everyone can do is talk to the folks that represent that if investment, and by next year we are laying tracks. And 20, 31, 32, we are running trains.

After that, it’s just expanding the network. We are not talking about anything else because we already set the example that’s doable. Now it’s a rinse, repeat, just go do more of it and do it more efficiently. And so I think we are ahead of the game. I would love to find a way to get Bright Line built at the same time within the same timeframe that we will have our trains up and running, which is 2032.

Uh, they have some new revisions that you probably read in the news that they have some issues with the cost estimation. Something, uh, that maybe you’re very familiar with, uh, what that means. So it went a little higher than, uh, they were anticipating.

So you actually could run a train from trans Bay or Fourth and King or wherever it’s gonna end up here to Vegas directly.

Those are different types of service models. And the train and the track is not the one that changes. It’s what service you, you’re trying to deliver. If morning service, you wanna run all the way to San Francisco and have a stop in Fresno, and a stop in Bakersfield. But nothing to do with Vegas, because Vegas is weekenders who want to go there.

Then you don’t have to worry about that. You just go Palmdale turn and then you go straight to la Right?

I mean, you could do it, you

Audience Question:  Hi. You probably get this question a lot, but what’s stopping us from going faster?

Why you don’t want to go more than x mile per hour because it is,

Contracting and then getting teams on board when they will go and design or finalize the design that you gave them. And then they start construction. And then after that is really laws of physics, how fast you can build. So if you put 10,000 people to build one station. Then you will take 10,000 years to build it because they’re all gonna be tripping over each other.

But if you may put 200 people to that station, they will do it maybe in six months. So is the, is the, uh, metaphor that I use was like, you put 10 engineers to change the light bulb and give them a letter in a room. Light bulb is the only thing that’s gonna be crying there because they will not agree how to do it.

And they will be still, you come back two days later, they will be still there talking about it, which way to do it. So we rightsize it and we say we want to build it in the right way. When we did acceleration of the schedule the amount of engagement we had with the industry tells us that it would be 20 38, 39 for the whole deal, 2032.

It’s really for what we have committed today, central Valley to get it done, which is our test track. So we want to get it done and run the trains so people actually can. Get ready to say this is coming now.

And I think Alstom and Siemens submitted bids and and then high speed rail authority. Kind of paused on those bids or something like that. There was some conjecture, uh, maybe it was trains.com or I don’t remember where it was that, that had said that, um, perhaps high-speed rail would not stay committed to maintaining the same train set geometry as what Brightline has.

This is very nerdy kind of question, but is high speed rail still committed to having the same. Train set geometry as bright line such that California trains can stop at their stations and bright line trains can stop at California stations. And also, how does that work with Caltrain, which has a smaller train body size?

When I came on board, I’m like, okay, we’ll have these trains. What are we gonna do with it? Uh, we don’t have track. We don’t have the garage to park and we don’t have electrification done. So which is the right order of things to do? Buy the car, then build the road, and then. Find the town that you want to go to.

No, that’s all inverse. That’s know where you’re going and then buy those. So that was the pause. Nothing to compare high speed trains or high speed trains, they have been used and deployed worldwide. So we are not doing a project of r and d, so we are not interested in that. And so if someone is gonna go do something unique and they want to put casino cars in there and that’s how they’re gonna fund.

Then we don’t have that. We have taxpayers money to give them the service, not adventures. Like we want them to have a comfortable ride business ride, normal ride economy, ride like any other high speed system in the world. So we don’t compare to a private sector having different intent and different reasons to do that.

Our business case is simple. People give us the money we need to give them back what they asked for. So that’s what we are trying to do. Second to your second point was. If we have Caltrain on the other end, what do we do with the platforms? So in our plan just so that everyone understand, when we get into the Caltrain network from San Jose or even from Gilroy, we have investment to build platforms that are right sized for our system.

Even though we will run on Caltrain tracks, when we reach to the station, the platform will be separated. And that’s very typical in almost anywhere in the world where you have high speed. You cannot make trains all the same size,

Does everyone know what I’m talking about? Okay,

And that’s engineering. And we wanna make sure that we are gonna deploy the same historic engineering methods to make sure when people are walking away from one train and getting into the other. They don’t actually know what the difference was. One is 48 inch high platform, the other is 26. It didn’t, it doesn’t matter to them because they don’t feel the difference.

Mm-hmm. And that is how it is done across Europe. The 40,000 kilometer network you have in Europe in 28 countries. The trains are running seamless, but the platforms are not. And you never noticed that.

Uh, online and I saw the, the civic leaders of Merced give their plea to be included. Cause I know that, that there’s a plan now on the board to, to come directly to the Bay Area and to leave off that three to $4 billion jog up to Merced, which seems like the only sensible thing to do to prioritize a connection to 7 million people.

Over one to a hundred thousand people, you know? Um and I know that that’s part of one of the ideas in the supplemental report. I’m geeky enough to have read this stuff, but so thank you. You’re welcome. But, and, and so I, I was very interested in that because it just seems like the most obvious thing you could possibly do.

And the BART Tunnel has been approved. Apparently the tunneling, the boring machine has already been built and paid for and is sitting in Germany according to the reporting and waiting to be used. And that tunneling isn’t even gonna start till 2029. And I guess the tunnel boring, you know, it’s like two miles a year, right?

I mean, you can’t. Funding isn’t gonna make those machines go faster. Right. It’s like there’s a time bound, right? There’s like we start the tunneling and it’s gonna take X number of years to finish the tunneling, right? So I’m wondering if in this connection, this accelerated connection to the Bay Area, which is very exciting.

And I think if people understood what that was about, there would be a lot more excitement about it because you connect San Francisco to Bakersfield and even. That’s like 75% of the value, the benefit of the whole phase one system. If you go to Tehachapi, that’s like 90, 95% of the value. But it’s all about the Gilroy getting to Gilroy.

So I’m just kind of curious what the authority is doing now to, you know, what’s the level of priority to like really zero in on that, that tunneling aspect, because that’s the thing that’s gonna hang everything up, isn’t it?

Normal tunneling, uh, the average comes out to 60, 70 foot a day construction. You can do mining, align operations, 8.6 or nine meter diameter, which is right roughly 24 to 27 foot diameter. You can do about 60, 70 foot a day. That is just the speed of the tunneling. Now, it’s not because they cannot accelerate tunneling.

It’s not that. It is what to do with the surplus earth that is coming out. And if you are in downtown San Francisco, whatcha gonna do with it. If you want to drill it fast, there is someone that you know who tried, wanted to go 700 foot. A day

And so why? Because you cannot have a truck coming out of a tunnel every 30 seconds. In the mix of all the traffic you have. So tunnel build, tunnel machine builders after 200 years realize that it’s not the speed that matters. Let’s stabilize everything else that goes around tunneling in the dense urban areas.

And then if you are out in like we are doing in the Hacha piece, for example, or in Pacheco. You will not find a tunnel machine builder who will say, just because you are running in this mountain, I will build you a different machine because I really like you guys. No, it’s a BMW catalog car. That’s what you’re gonna get.

No matter what to do, that’s their business. So when we came down to why, how can we reduce tunnels on the program, we are looking at the reservoir that we have, past loss values. We are looking at that as like, are we doing the most efficient way to construct it? When we changed the grades that we were talking about earlier, we realize also maybe the alignment could be in a little more flatter area.

And so our tunnels went down from, in that section from 16 miles of continuous tunneling today to about 3.8 and 3.8 70 foot a day. Way faster to do it. And if you have a continuous tunnel for a long uninterrupted part. Segment, you have to put all the wildlife safety systems in place to make sure that you have evacuation path for people because we are in the tunnel for a very long time.

When if it is a tunnel that goes only mile and a half, and your train is running at two 20 mile per hour, you can do the math, how fast you’re outta that, and then you get into the next one and the next one, and they’re. So what we did when, uh, I came on board is like, look at all of those aspects and cut short these very intrusive infrastructure decisions that were made in the past and to improve them so we can build it faster.

That’s how we are looking at it, the entire program.

Stations are just surrounded by farms currently. So when high speed rail opens, are those farms just gonna be like, are those farm owners going to get like billions of dollars and effectively taxpayer subsidy from the train going to their station, or, uh, what will be done to capture the value that the train creates?

Because getting more tax revenue is pretty difficult because of prop 13 from a property tax.

So it’s all about the ridership, right? Uh, it’s all, uh, making sense out of is it commercially viable operation that you stop and, uh, decelerate and accelerate and move these trains when you have riders? In the train and there is no ridership in those areas. So that’s not the best use of, of passenger train, high speed system.

What you may wanna think, well what we were talking about earlier is what king tall or those towns can benefit from it. Maybe it’s not, initially is not the high speed passenger service. It is maybe what happens during the night in the non-revenue hours when they can move their produce with cars that are not the train that cost you a lot of money to run, but a cargo car that you can put your produce and you can send it all the way to LA or another internal dry port.

Which is what the Eurostar is doing.

Can you comment on what’s coming up for Bakersfield? Thinking in particular about that last little bit to get. The right of way into downtown Bakersfield. And I mean, the other end is interesting too, but I think that’s what really makes the first operating segment really valuable. So do we have more construction coming shortly that we’ll get that done by 2032.

And have you seen the video with the song?

Now. The point for Bakersfield, would you see construction going towards that before 2032? Of course, yes. We are gonna put that, uh, 2020 early 27. We are procuring civil contracts. Get to Bakersfield. So you will see all the activity that you saw in Central Valley that was happening between Fresno and the next town and the next town, all the way to Madera on the north that will now continue into Bakersfield.

Roger Rudick: I guess that is it.