The Sacramento headquarters of the California High Speed Rail Authority occupy a suite of offices in a high-rise building a half-block from the state Capitol. That’s where I sat down with Tony Daniels, a bluff, silver-haired Englishman who works as project director on the rail plan. When Daniels asked about my trip from Los Angeles the night before, I told him that our bus arrived in San Jose with seven minutes to spare. After a sprint through the station, I made it to a Sacramento-bound train that turned out to be surprisingly efficient. Daniels seemed amused. You should have taken the San Joaquin, he said; “that’s a nice train.” Too bad ours isn’t built yet, he added.

Daniels helps coordinate the hundreds of engineers — almost all of them private contractors at large firms — working on the California high-speed project. He reports to an executive director named Mehdi Morshed, an engineer whose résumé is filled with California transportation projects, as well as to a board of nine political appointees. After a few hours talking with Daniels and Morshed, I still couldn’t gauge the mood in the rail-authority offices. The place seemed to have an air of both defeat and giddy optimism. The rail authority has never been especially popular; for years its cause has been criticized as a science-fiction dream and, more recently, a government boondoggle to dwarf all previous government boondoggles. Even for the less cynical — editorial boards and legislators, mainly — legitimate philosophical questions about its mission have never fully subsided. Can California really afford such a project? Shouldn’t transportation dollars be spent instead on upgrading urban mass transit or commuter rail, both of which would also ease freeway traffic? Over the past decade, specific parts of the rail plan — tunnels, mountain passes, stations, environmental impacts, costs, ridership estimates, the technologies needed, you name it — have been challenged at nearly every turn by officials and citizens alike, as have the motives and wisdom of rail-authority board members and staff employees. All the while, the state’s governors (Pete Wilson at first, then Gray Davis) endorsed the authority’s existence but withheld full-throated support. And then suddenly last year, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who as governor had mostly displayed a “benign indifference” for the project, as the rail-authority chairman Quentin Kopp told me, revealed an extreme form of high-speed-train enthusiasm. Last fall Schwarzenegger agreed to put the $10 billion bond issue on the ballot, and to the surprise of many it won. When the recent federal stimulus plan offered the possibility of billions more for the California rail project, it was as if the perpetual losers in Sacramento won a huge talent contest they never expected to win.

Image Credit... Illustration by Bryan Christie Design

In a country with no real experience of bullet trains — the Acela, which runs between Boston and Washington, doesn’t exceed 150 m.p.h. — it isn’t immediately obvious what makes the systems so advanced and expensive. When I met with Daniels he took me through the ways a high-speed train differs from, say, the Surfliner. “These are very powerful animals,” he said of the vehicles that run in Europe and Asia. It’s more accurate to think of them as lithe rather than brawny, however. They are light. Or as the French tend to say, the trains have a high power-to-weight ratio that allows them to attain terrific velocities. What’s more, the newest high-speed designs do not depend on locomotives pulling or pushing a string of cars. Instead, powerful motors are distributed throughout the undersides of the train cars. Up above, the trains are delicate: the pantograph that touches an overhead electrical wire (the catenary) is far more sensitive than its equivalent on regular trains in order to maintain electrical contact at extreme speeds. Things are different on the ground too. Crossties are made from concrete and not timber, and rails are sometimes set on a concrete bed rather than a ballast of crushed stone. The alignment of the rails cannot involve tight curves or sharp turns — because straighter track is faster, and faster track is the whole point. One of the most crucial distinctions with the trains, finally, is invisible: they have a signaling technology, called “positive train control,” that keeps tabs on the location of the trains in operation. If a train gets close to the one ahead of it, it slows down automatically — or shuts down altogether if it gets too close. A big seismic tremor or act of sabotage trips the system, too.

You can’t plunk a bullet train down on an existing corridor. High-speed lines in Asia and Europe are, in the argot of transportation engineers like Daniels, “dedicated lines without grade crossings.” That means vast stretches of the routes are for high-speed trains only (no freight or commuter trains allowed) and are built so that anything crossing the train’s path (local roads, highways, freight lines, white-tailed deer) must do so via overpass or underpass. Hence a virgin 400- or 500-mile track in California, in addition to its own construction, entails hundreds of massive construction projects in order to divert all sorts of cross traffic. A dedicated line also requires a secure fence on both sides of the tracks. Because it takes several miles to brake-stop a train barreling along at 200 m.p.h. — French authorities consider drivers incapable of reacting quickly enough to stimuli at top speed — fences are needed to keep cattle and curious kids from wandering near.

As Daniels described his project, I tried to scribble down his to-do list, but that seemed almost hopeless. In addition to the current financing, the rail system will need tens of billions of additional dollars from the state, the federal government and private investors to actually be finished. In addition to track beds and rails and fences and trains and signals — all built to withstand earthquakes — a large power supply and vast new electrical system with substations every 30 miles will be needed. There will be as many as 24 passenger stations along the way, most of them built from scratch, while others, like Union Station in Los Angeles, will need to be expanded significantly to accommodate millions of new train riders every year. (A small but typical headache: Union Station is on the national register of historic places, which makes renovations and expansions especially fraught.) The train plan will also necessitate thousands of pages of environmental and public-review documents. And it will require an entirely new set of safety regulations from the Federal Rail Administration. The F.R.A. has largely focused on requiring trains to demonstrate crash worthiness, whereas in Europe and Asia the emphasis is on avoiding crashes. (There was a deadly high-speed-train accident in Germany in 1998, but in 45 years of operation in Japan, and in 28 years in France, there has never been a fatality on a high-speed train.)

And these aren’t even the biggest problems. The monumental difficulty of the California rail project is finalizing the route. An approximate plan has been approved, but over the next year the authority will pinpoint precisely where the train will run, down to the inch. Significant purchases of land will have to be made, and in some places the state might have to exercise eminent domain. At one point Daniels took me down into what he calls his war room, a large space with huge maps on the wall and thousands of pages of regulatory documents piled on tables. One thing you notice if you spend time with rail planners is that it’s difficult to separate engineering concerns from economic and political issues. It’s as if the relationship between these competing forces forms a set of interrelated mathematical equations; change one variable and you have to rework the entire calculus. One of the largest maps in Daniels’s war room is of the 58 miles between Bakersfield and Merced. It’s a stretch of pancake-flat farmland — “the train will just whistle here,” Daniels said — through which the lines of two freight railroads, the Union Pacific and the Burlington Northern Santa Fe, already pass. Both companies own strips of land bordering their own tracks that they can sell or lease. Union Pacific apparently isn’t interested in the high-speed-rail authority’s offers; Burlington Northern is. The Union Pacific route is a straight line; the Burlington route arcs between the towns. All told, the Burlington route is several miles longer, which leads to a dilemma. By law — that is, according to the bond measure that authorizes the rail project — the California train has to travel between San Francisco and Los Angeles in 2 hours 40 minutes. Adding distance might add too much time. Daniels showed me a printout of a computer model demonstrating how a particular German high-speed train, one of the best in the world, would do on the longer route. “It comes in at 2 hours 39 minutes and 53 seconds,” he said. “That’s too tight for me.” It’s possible the Germans (or other manufacturers) could build a souped-up train. Or it’s possible the route could be shortened in other spots. It’s also possible that a portion of the route elsewhere could be engineered with a lesser gradient that would permit greater speed. But that could require a longer tunnel — and more money. And what about buying some farmland for a more direct route? Reduced time, but more money. And no doubt a political headache as well. “It’s tough,” Daniels said, almost to himself, as he looked at the map. And this was just one segment.