LA by Brightline (not really LA but that’s okay) to Las Vegas high speed rail The project is progressing slowly. Officials are aiming for a completion date of 2028, but competition between companies over who will be first to build the high-speed trains could derail things.
Bloomberg report about the mess going on behind the scenes. The problem appears to stem from federal funds received from the infrastructure bill.
Brightline West, backed by Fortress Investment Group, is being funded in part with $3 billion from the bipartisan infrastructure bill. But the federal money comes with a requirement to use U.S.-made products under “Buy American” provisions.
Because of those provisions, the trains would have to be built in the United States by American companies. Except that no U.S. train manufacturer currently builds a train capable of reaching the speeds Brightline requires. That has forced Brightline to look to Europe for a train manufacturer. Now, France’s Alstrom SA and Germany’s Siemens have both applied for exemptions from the infrastructure bill’s requirements so they can build the trains. That has created a tangle of lawsuits, with each company trying to block the other from getting an exemption to build the trains.
In July, Alstom filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Transportation, challenging the decision to award the Brightline West train contract to Siemens. In the lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., Alstom argued that the new Amtrak Acela fleet it is building at its current Hornell, New York, facility should be considered a domestic option.
In a response filed in late August, Siemens dismissed the lawsuit as a “collateral attack.” The company had previously pledged to build a new factory in the United States to support Brightline West, announcing on September 9 that the site would be in Horseheads, New York.
Both companies are investing heavily in factories and workers in the United States. Alstrom has invested $80 million in its Hornell, New York, facility, where it is upgrading Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor trains. Siemens appears to be slightly ahead, with plans to begin building 200-plus mph trains at its Horsehead, New York, plant in 2026. While construction on the Vegas-to-Southern California line is moving forward, “the Alstom lawsuit has rail advocates worried, knowing how easily ambitious projects can get derailed,” Bloomberg notes.
Meanwhile, politicians like Democratic U.S. Representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts are calling for loosening and exemptions from U.S. manufacturing requirements. “As much as we all love ‘Buy American,’ we can’t start there. We need to have some exceptions at the beginning, and those exceptions are quite reasonable. It’s incredibly important that we actually get high-speed rail here so that Americans can see what we’re missing out on,” he told Bloomberg.
