Victorville to Las Vegas Boondoggle (Anaheim, Palmdale: hotel, home, casinos)

[humboldtrat]

Plans are being made to build a high speed train between Victorville and Las Vegas. The train from no where will have a park-and-ride lot in Victorville. If people from LA are going to drive as far as Victorville, why not drive the rest of the way to Las Vegas? Not much difference going 75mph on I-15 than going 150mph on a train. Maybe an hour.

Las Vegas May Get DesertXpress High-Speed Rail Link

[Fontucky]

The bumper-to-bumper return traffic on 15 between LV and Barstow isn't pleasant. But if LV and those casino owners want it so badly, they can fund the lion's share with the billions they remove from gamblers.

[Axxlrod]

I drove back from vegas last sunday, and the traffic was really bad... all the way until the produce inspection station. Yep, that was the bottleneck.

The highly effective and necessary checkpoint on the southbound side of the 15 freeway that clogs up traffic for miles until a uniformed state worker just waves you through... Really, just what is the point???

So maybe a train would be a viable alternative if it whisks you past the traffic on those horrible sunday afternoons.

[Mojave82]

If the Victimville politicians are involved, Expect an epic fail. SCLA took almost 15+ years and it is nothing but an eye sore of an aircraft grave yard. I remember big plans for expanding the D Street station, but that was just another fart in the wind.

Really have to ask, why would anyone travel to Victorville to catch a train to Vegas. Southwest has cheap flights almost daily.

[Marv101]

I agree with Fontucky--if the Vegas casinos want to build it, let em. The folks proposing this know that the existence of this train will enable folks to stay in Vegas a little while longer to lose more $$$, as opposed to having to be out of Vegas well berfore noon in order to avoid turning the trip home into a nightmare.

It took me 6.5 hours to drive back to LA in July of 2010; I left my Strip hotel at 1 PM.

[SportyandMisty]

Desert Xpress is not popular in Las Vegas or Nevada either.

There were two proposals:

• one that would take the high speed train to Anaheim if IIRC - a superspeed maglev train,
• and the alternative to Victorville pushed by US Senator Harry Reid (D-Nevada) who is Senate Majority Leader.

Almost no one in Nevada is in favor of the Victorville route for obvious reasons. The backers are frequently referred to as shady and believed to be landholders who would benefit from the Victorville route - although certainly some of that is just anti-Reid anger. Reid said he gave up on the Anaheim project because of no tangible progress over the years.

[Marv101]

Given the staggering amount of land which the Feds owns in SoCal and southern Nevada (heck, the entire state, for that matter), I don't know how they'd route the train from Anaheim to Barstow, and then on to Vegas without having to deal with going through Cajon Pass.

There's no doubt in my mind that environmentalists would go apopleptic over the amount of blasting that would have to be done, and the same would apply to Governor Moonbeam's proposed HSR train between Anaheim & SF via Palmdale.

IMHO, both of these propositions are mega-boondoggles.