So, Toks Omishakin is California's Secretary of Transportation and Anthony Williams, a Rail Authority board member. Both are relatively new to the job left to answer for their predecessors. There were mistakes made.Some of the criticism on this on this project, I think, are very fair. What happened. I don't think the voters fully understood, and neither did we in the public sector, what it was going to take to actually get this project delivered.To get the necessary political buy-in from the whole state, th ...

By 2019, costs ballooning and the timeline years off schedule, bipartisan political pressure mounted. Newly elected Governor Gavin Newsom said this in his first state of the state. Right now, there simply isn't a path to get from Sacramento to San Diego, let alone from, you know, San Francisco to LA.Under Newsom, who didn't respond to repeated interview requests, California decided to focus on that initial Central Valley segment, a route few clamored for and fewer are likely to ride, though the ultimate goa ...

Here outside Fresno in California's central valley, one of the few signs of concrete progress, literally structures like this. Locals here jokingly refer to it as their own Stonehenge. Ideally, these bridges and vioaducts will one day be used to support California highspeed rail, but for now, these are curiosities in a field, monuments to promises that haven't been met and plans that haven't been executed.Ironic because American rail was once the world's envy. In the 1800s, the US government oversaw the bir ...

Bright Line's Florida trains run at street level through crowded neighborhoods. And according to numbers compiled by the Miami Herald and local public radio, more than 200 people have been hit and killed by the trains in the near decade since operations began. Bright Line says that running rail in the desert out west, where track crossings won't be at street level, will be a safer proposition.Then there are the finances. The stratospheric cost of building and running a rail line vastly outstrip revenues. An ...

Just to be clear as we speak right now, are the funds there to complete LA to San Francisco. >> The entire amount of money we need, not there today, but do we believe we can get those funds to get the the project done. Absolutely.>> How much do you estimate it's going to cost to connect highspeed rail San Francisco to LA. >> Today, we estimate with the right optimization just over $125 billion. I think $126 billion is the current estimate for that.That's more funding than Amtrak has received in its history ...

The very model of modern engineering. It hums across the fruited planes at a top speed of 200 mph. It's revolutionized travel.It's a source of national pride in Morocco. >> Here in the US, highspeed rail looks like this. Hardly passenger ready.America's hopes for its first highspeed rail were kindled in 2008 when California voters approved a ballot measure for a train connecting Los Angeles to San Francisco in less than 3 hours. The estimated price tag $33 billion. Completion date 2020.It would cut pollutio ...

In 2025, President Trump cancelled $4 billion in federal grants for the train, swiping at a political nemesis in the process. >> Did you ever hear of Gavin Nuskum. He has got that train is the worst cost overrun I've ever seen.>> In a statement to 60 Minutes, Secretary of Transportation Shawn Duffy said the administration is in favor of high-speed rail, but this project has quote wasted billions in taxpayer dollars yet delivered nothing. Can this be done without help from the federal government. >> This ini ...

Morocco has highspeed rail and Serbia and China and Japan and Western Europe. Why don't we. What's your simple answer.>> Well, the simple answer is they've decided they want to do it and pay for it and we haven't. >> You think we will in our lifetimes. >> I don't know.I'm dubious. I'm dubious. Absent a national political will to work with the states to to create some of these systems.I think it's going to be in of course my lifetime almost certainly not, but maybe yours. I don't know. ...

First, a report on patients, cut off from health care, getting help. Then, the state of high-speed rail in the U.S. And, a look at the Mardi Gras Indians keeping tradition alive. "60 Minutes" is the most successful television broadcast in history. Offering hard-hitting investigative reports, interviews, feature segments and profiles of people in the news, the broadcast began in 1968 and is still a hit, over 50 seasons later, regularly making Nielsen's Top 10. Subscribe to the "60 Minutes" YouTube channel: h ...

It's hard to exaggerate the role of the train in the American story or the romance of train travel, those iron horses galloping down tracks of steel. Why then has high-speed rail, so common in other countries, not tracked in the US. An ambitious state-run project connecting LA and San Francisco has lurched, derailed, cost billions, and may never happen.One private company is betting that it can succeed where the public sector is not. But that too has had its bumps. As US highspeed rail remains a mirage, a g ...