The High-Speed Rail Labor Coalition has entered a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Brightline. The two will work together to build Brightline West, the nation’s first high-speed train network in the southwest. The project involves a $10 billion dollar investment but has a number of benefits.
That stretch of rail will feature five different stations. The Southern California end will sit in Rancho Cucamonga. The other end will be at the Strip in Las Vegas and between the two stops will be three more in Apple Valley, Hesperia, and Victor Valley, California. Once completed, it’ll take passengers from Southern California near Los Angeles to Las Vegas, a 218-mile trip, in just over two hours.
Brightline expects it to create almost 35,000 jobs during construction and add more than $10 billion in economic impact. Many of those jobs will go to union workers involved as a part of this deal. The High-Speed Rail Labor Coalition includes 13 different rail unions representing more than 160,000 regional, commuter, and passenger railroad workers.
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Once the line is up and running it’ll maintain around 1,000 jobs while significantly reducing emissions. The train itself is fully electric and Brightline says that it’ll remove some 3 million cars from the roadways each year. In practical terms that’s approximately 400,000 tons of CO2 annually.
This isn’t actually the first high-speed railway in the USA or even the first one that Brightline itself is working on. Amtrak’s Acela railway in the Northeast Corridor connects D.C., Boston, Baltimore, and other cities and can reach speeds of 150 mph (240 km/h).
Brightline itself is in the process of testing a line that’ll go up to 125 mph between South and Central Florida. As of now, it has a line from Miami to West Palm Beach that reaches about 79 mph (130 km/h). It expects its rail from SoCal to Las Vegas to reach completion by 2026 or 2027.