In Las Vegas, A Billionaire’s Blueprint For Building Bullet Trains

23.04.2024 - 12:33 / forbes.com / Pete Buttigieg

Under a blazing morning Las Vegas sun, billionaire Wes Edens and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg threw a party this week to mark the start of construction of Brightline West, the first private high-speed railway in the U.S., driving yellow spikes into a section of track.

Now comes the hard part. His $12 billion project is three years behind schedule, but if construction goes as fast as the billionaire cofounder of Fortress Investment Group promises, it'll open in time to speed travelers across the desert at 200 miles per hour from Sin City to Southern California in time for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.

“The timeline is both realistic and achievable,” Edens told Forbes. “The impact of this is going to be long-lasting and prodigious. And I want it to be successful because I want the next one and the next one and the next one to happen.”

If he manages to build it on time and within budget, the 218-mile project from Las Vegas to Rancho Cucamonga – a small city east of Los Angeles linked to the sprawling metropolis by a commuter rail line – could be a catalyst for high-speed trains in the U.S. It’s on a fast construction schedule to open years ahead of the $128 billion high-speed train line California began building almost a decade ago – and that won’t connect San Francisco to Los Angeles until the 2040s. Brightline, which also operates a Florida railway between Orlando and Miami, expects 11 million one-way passengers a year to use the electric train, estimating it will slash travel time between L.A. and Las Vegas to three hours or less versus five hours or more by car. And it’s intended to do so with dramatically lower carbon emissions by being all-electric. The company estimates the railway will cut an estimated 400,000 tons of carbon dioxide by eliminating 3 million car trips annually between Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

“I believe that when this project is complete it's going to open the floodgates for American expectations around high-speed rail,” Buttigieg told Forbes. “This is important because it establishes that it can be done here (in Las Vegas) and it can be done here in the United States of America.”

The groundbreaking site, a scrubby, empty desert lot next to the 15 freeway and near the Las Vegas Strip, will be home to Brightline West’s main station, as well as future retail and residential projects Edens envisions. “It’ll be unrecognizable if you come back in a few years,” he said.

More than half of the project’s cost ($6.5 billion) is covered with some form of federal support

That’s thanks in part to one of its major backers: the train-loving Biden Administration. Late last year, the administration awarded Brightline West a $3 billion grant out of its $1 trillion 2021 infrastructure