One unexpected benefit of Donald Trump's election as the next President of the United States could be additional future federal funding for California's high-speed rail system.

"Trump may be friendly to it," Sierra Club California Director Kathryn Phillips told the Chronicle. "He will want to create jobs."

Last March, Trump compared the United States rail system to that of a third world country. He lauded China for quickly building a nationwide high-speed rail system. "[The Chinese] have trains that go 300 miles per hour," said Trump. "We have trains that go chug-chug-chug."

During his election night victory speech, Trump emphasized that one of his top priorities will be funding a massive infrastructure program that could include high-speed rail projects across the nation.

Supporting the California high-speed rail system has been difficult for the state and its leading proponent, Governor Jerry Brown. The rail system is currently expected to cost $68 billion dollars.

In 2008 state voters approved a 9 billion dollar bond to help fund the system. The federal government contributed an additional $3.3 billion in stimulus money from the America Recovery Act of 2009.

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Since then the Republican-controlled Congress has not provided any additional federal funding. Gov. Brown has attempted to bridge the remaining gap in money with a mixture of state bonds and money from the state's pollution cap and trade funds but has faced resistance from state Republican politicians and farmers in the Central Valley.

California's high-speed rail system avoided another potential death blow election night when voters rejected Proposition 53 which would have forced the state to get voter approval for any financial bond over 2 billion dollars.

Construction on the rail system started in the Central Valley around Fresno in 2015. The initial length of the train system is scheduled to reach San Jose by 2025. The system is the expected to be completed from Los Angeles to San Francisco by 2029.

The high-speed rail authority recently cut the length of trains from 20 cars to 10 to reduce the construction costs of the system's station platforms. Another cost cutting feature will allow trains to travel at 200 mph through tunnels instead of 220 mph which will cut the expense of building tunnels.

If completed, the high-speed rail system will transport passengers from San Francisco to Los Angeles in as little as 2 hours and 40 minutes.