VICTORVILLE — High Desert residents eager for high-speed rail travel between here and Las Vegas will have to wait a bit longer.

Completion dates of a proposed railway with a stations in Victorville and near Las Vegas Boulevard is likely to be pushed back about a year. Initial estimates called for the railway to be done by 2022.

Officials with the company behind the rail project, Virgin Trains USA, now indicate the railway should be finished by 2023. Virgin Trains USA, the nation's only privately owned passenger train railroad, began rail service between Fort Lauderdale and Miami in Florida earlier this year.

As part of the Florida project, the company also plans an additional rail line between Orlando and West Palm Beach.

Virgin Trains USA officials are releasing few details of the Victorville-to-Las Vegas project. Locations of the stations in Victorville and Las Vegas, for example, have not been specified, although news reports said a station location is being considered near the Rio casino in Las Vegas.

While the company has not explicitly mentioned 2023 as a completion date, a Virgin Trains official who declined to be named told the Daily Press the timeline for the California-Nevada system "should be rather comparable to the Orlando route under construction now."

The company estimates the Florida route to be done in 36 months. Using a similar timeline and a construction start date of 2020, as Virgin Trains has indicated, the California-Nevada rail line should be completed by 2023.

This year has been one of transition for the Victorville-Las Vegas project, which was originally proposed by XpressWest, another private rail concern. The Brightline company agreed to acquire XpressWest in September 2018.

Brightline subsequently partnered with British businessman Richard Bransen, expanding his Virgin brand and creating Virgin Trains USA.

The company briefly entered the Initial Public Offering process in February of this year, before cancelling the move. Without elaborating, the company said it decided not to go public because “alternative funding options became available.”

“We will be fully consumer facing as a Virgin brand by the end of 2019,” said a company official, meaning railway trains, stations and other elements of the system will be marked with Virgin Trains signage. “The next couple announcements will be showcasing the brand identity, what the company will look like, and then releasing the train image to the public,” he said.

Virgin Trains USA officials would not specify how much the project will cost, but the company has said it expects to cut XpressWest’s previous estimates of $8 billion in half.

Officials added that with the high-speed rail project, the company intends to not just cut the price of travel between Southern California and Las Vegas, but also take cars off the road, improve the environment, and add jobs to the economy.

One Virgin Trains USA official, who wished to remain anonymous, told the Daily Press that “initial reports estimate that we expect to take 4.5 million cars off the road, which is the equivalent of eliminating 645 million pounds of carbon from the atmosphere. And the project in Florida is expected to create 10,000 jobs over the first eight years,” with the California-Nevada project generating similar job growth.

Virgin Trains USA has said there are about a dozen potential rail projects that fit the company's goal of connecting well-populated, metropolitan areas that are close enough to each other to facilitate passenger rail travel.

Xtrain, which is planning another Southern California-Nevada rail route, has announced passenger service linking Los Angeles to Las Vegas is to begin in September.