Greetings from a railfan from India. Nice videos, love the music!! I have been looking at your and other videos of the construction progress of the CAHSR, and I am always left surprised at the slow pace of actual construction compared to developing countries. I am comparing to the first dedicated HSR in my home country and to Indonesia's recently opened line. Of course, it is cheaper to build and may be easier to acquire land/get permissions in developing countries. Even so Indonesia saw about 2-3years for getting permissions and acquiring the land, and in India it took close to 6years for that process to be completed. But I would have thought once construction contracts are given out, the actual pace of construction would not be that different. Of course I am not exactly an expert in how construction works and only know the broad strokes. From what I have gathered online, construction for the CAHSR, at least the initial 120mile section, started as far back as 2016. 8years on, I would not call this a huge amount of progress. In comparison, in Indonesia actual construction on their 90mile section started in mid 2018 and opened for operations in late 2024. And construction was more challenging in Indonesia with 65miles being on viaducts and 10miles of tunnels. To compare with India, where construction on 220/320miles only began in late 2020 while for the rest only in late 2023, the progress seems much better. Even in India, construction is more challenging with 90% of the 320miles being on viaducts. One section will have a 200+mile long viaduct, and another section includes a 13mile tunnel going under the sea and the major city of Mumbai. You can see monthly progress videos, not very detailed though, on NHSRCL's YT channel. The latest video is here: ruclips.net/video/eP-aTcmSeiY/видео.html The only potential reason I can see is because construction is cheaper, contractors can use a lot more manpower and machinery to have more parallel construction happening at more sites. PS: There is also a chance that it just "looks" slower in the case of California, due to the mostly at grade nature!!!
@@julupani oh it is slow for sure :-) There were a lot of environmental and legal battles. Here in the Central Valley, this is the easy part, geography wise. It's just that a lot of people here in the Central Valley did not want to give up farmland and so they resisted it and fought it as hard as they could. Even my hometown Hanford city government fought it. They did not want the station downtown. It's out in the country on the edge of town. You could compare it to a sibling rivalry, where one brother keeps taking the other brother's pencil, then laughs at his brother for being so slow at his homework.
In Indonesia, it is in fact very difficult to get things built as well. That is why the high speed rail system in Indonesia is more impressive still, because for decades many projects in Indonesia struggle due to land rights. Japan, a country famous for building rail systems, also has a difficult time too, if you can believe that. The new Shinkansen between Tokyo and Osaka (MAGLEV one) is bogged down in a land dispute through a small rural area. Besides that, you are right, things are extremely slow in California. Not only for civil engineering works, but even for residential construction or small business, one needs a lot of permits and layers of approval that often require hiring an attorney. My reasoned guess why it is like this--California is run by lawyers. Lawyers love to make laws and debate about them. Until we start electing engineers, I'm not hopeful for change. BTW, one of my favorite things about India is that they deployed relatively high speed rail at a low cost. Its an impressive achievement that more people should discuss and consider, instead of only chasing after the top dollar solutions for every scenario. Cheers.
In addition to the mentioned legal challenges, there's also challenges with utility relocations by local electric, water, gas, and freight rail companies, which limits completing some work, and also with getting sufficient labor due to limited per-year spending and challenges recruiting and training people. Generally workers on the job hangs out about 1500 per week these days, but it's been as low as a thousand or so, I think, which I think explains why you see some structures like the Dutch John Cut river bridges deprioritized for months or years on end to focus labor on the large and time-consuming elements like the Tule River pergola/viaduct, Hanford, or Conejo. Once those start wrapping up, a lot of those smaller elements should come together pretty fast, I think--a lot like the highway 41 bridge that Jason also did some drone footage of, which came together in about 6 months including demolition of the existing structure being replaced.
@@stevens1041 Land related issues will almost always be there for such large infrastructure projects, especially in federal and democratic setups. What I was referring to is the pace of construction post availability of land and permits.
@@rwdavidoff Yes, the limited spending per year is what I thought of as well. But to me it seems like it would be better financially to build faster, even if it is costlier, since it would mean that you would start seeing a return much sooner. On the people with training part, I think CAHSR should have taken on a partner with experience in HSR. Indonesia of course almost outsourced the whole thing to the Chinese. The Indian case is a bit different though, where the Japanese were involved in the technical design and will supply the trains and many other components, but the actual construction is being done by Indian contractors. The advantage of course was that with most of the Indian HSR being in tunnels or on viaducts, Indian contractors had built up a lot of experience with building those in the last 2 decades of building urban metro systems which were of similar design.
Once again thank you for the drone coverage of the Fresno area. Glad to see that the city is slowly moving to remove the Golden State roadway; maybe now they can start building the overpasses along the Union Pacific Right-of-way?
Wasn't expecting this up today! Thanks! I need to look at the Tulare and Ventura crossings a bit more and see if I can figure out what's delaying the railroad removing their shoofly diversion...if it's not just them being slow.
@@rwdavidoff I've been trying to fly them on Saturdays to hopefully catch any workers. Now, when it gets edited and published depends on what else I have going on for the rest of the weekend :-)
@@jasondroninaround Out of curiosity, what are you planning on doing after the last few sections (I estimate 3-4 left at 10-15 miles per section, given 12 miles on the north end, 27-29 on the south depending on re-flying Deer Creek). Starting the whole thing over seems like a big ask and not likely to show huge changes, but it'd be cool to get a look in on, say, Conejo, Tule River, Hanford, Deer Creek and Cross Creek, and downtown Fresno every few months. On the other hand, I don't know if RUclips makes it worth the time once your own personal curiosity about doing this series is satiated.
@@rwdavidoff Right now, the plan is start from the beginning and do it all over again but I think I'm going to fly it with little or no orbits. Just some little chicanes and video slow downs at the interesting parts. I should be able to cover a lot more ground in the same amount of video length.
@@rwdavidoff The drone flies about 26 mph, depending on if there's a head wind. Except for that last Fresno one, I've been running the video at 200% at the interesting parts and 800% in between. 800% of 26 mph is a little over 200 mph :-)
@@jasondroninaround That'd be really cool--honestly, I'm less worried about the length of the videos and more that it doesn't take more of your time than it's worth.
the IIJA funding covered the civil construction of the Bakersfield extension, so yeah construction should be happening in the next year or two. I'm pretty sure CHSRA has begun land acquisitions in that direction from Poplar Ave south.
I enjoyed the long, urban flyover. But it makes one appreciate how much work has yet to get underway! I try to be optimistic, but I wonder how many drones you are going to go through by the time this part of HSR is finished.
People don't realize how many water & sewer pipes, electrical conduits, buried telephone and fiber lines have to be dug up and moved before anything can be done. Some of the water and sewer lines have been there for 100+ years.
You'd think how much BNSF and UP are going to benefit from the traffic separation/cleared crossings, that they'd chip in a bit for the costs of road and bridge construction.
On the city grade separations like Shaw/Marks and Blackstone/McKinley the railroads pay 50% and the city pays 50%. Fresno is a poor city. Blackstone and McKinley should have been done 20 years ago. It was City Councilman Chris Mathys who got the ball rolling on the Shaw & Marks underpasses 20 years ago. His business is located nearby on Shaw and it was in his district. He was fed up with waiting on the trains everyday.
0:19 low speed rail at Florence Ave. 04:08 low speed rail at Fresno St 07:11 working on shit at Belmont Ave 11:16 low speed rail at the Union Pacific Yard 14:21 some open space between road and low speed rail 16:05 road parallelling low speed rail , interchange and cream my shorts! the dead end of high speed rail off in the distance! 16:22 end of the line - all passengers must fall off the edge here. 16:26 rail overpass. high speed rail crosses over low speed rail. 16:36 end of rail overpass. back to high speed rail. 16:47 end of high speed rail, back to dirt. slowly rotate drone to milk the footage. 17:02 show high speed rail from the other direction, back to rail overpass.
Yes, 2 tracks is the design (whether they do that from the get-go is another question). The central valley stations , with the exception of Madera, will have four tracks (two platform tracks and two bypass tracks).
@@squarebet6653 I try to stop the drone any specific spot that is easy to remember where I stopped it before I start the next video. I use a "smooth transition" in DaVinci Resolve to stitch them together. Depending on how well I matched the drone position of the previous video, the transition may or may not be easy to spot.
@@mb_1024 there's two moving trains in this one and I think they magically appear both times. One work in the UP Yard and the other over by Veterans Boulevard
@@mb_1024 All the times I've been up and down this project that parallels those freight lines, I keep thinking to myself it'd be cool if I catch a train. Every stinking time the train will come through as I was driving my van between filming locations. I was so excited when I finally caught the freight trains in Fresno. I even caught two! That's why you see that Amtrak in Corcoran filmed with my cell phone. It's like they knew when the drone was in the air and they all stayed away. Only way I can catch one was with my cell phone :-)
San Joaquin river viaduct is beautiful, but the thing right before it - the tunnel-like thing with the track laid on top of it diagonally is beyond ugly. Why did they do it like this?
@@TinLeadHammer this is where the high speed rail crosses over the Union Pacific line. It happens in a few places in this project. It crosses at a very shallow angle. So, there's really no pretty way of doing it.
@@TheRailwayDrone you noticed how I didn't jerk the drone over there till the very last second. I was thinking did they dig under the highway? Hopefully somebody can answer that. Did they actually tunnel it? I'm sure they didn't close down the freeway for that. I was pretty far away or I would have flown lower to look through it and see if it was all the way through :-)
@@jasondroninaround I know they tunneled under the highway because I remember CAHSR posting a video showing the tunnel. But I don't understand what's happening past that like under that rail spur. I thought they were doing construction on that but it looks like they just stopped.
@@TheRailwayDrone It looks like they're they are building them a little detour for a moment to try to keep it open. Then they're going to tear out the old ones just enough to build the underground section. Then reopen the original line, tear out the little detour and build the rest of the underground section. I don't know where there are any plans but that seems logical to me
@@TheRailwayDrone and speaking of CA HSR drone guy, he has some smooth orbits in his videos :-) I've been trying to fly mine manual as much as possible. They say that once you get good at manual orbits, you can do them better than the automatic ones. For instance, when I transition from an orbit to a straight flight, that has to all be manual. Until I get better, it's a little wobbly but at least it's uncut
Sadly, this has become such an embarrassment to the state of California. This is great footage. It shows how an ineffective government agency can ruin a plan to bring high-speed rail to central California.
The Veterans Boulevard interchange cost $140 million, $25 million from HSR funds. Think on that next time anyone starts whining about how much the rail project costs. Most of the expense is coming from the ten-lane climate arson features.
@@stevens1041 You are welcome to count the lanes on Veterans Blvd if you don't think there are ten. It is a car interchange that occupies 160 acres of prime land and the sole purpose of which is to enable car drivers who live outside city limits ten miles from central Fresno to speed around in their pickups. It is climate arson. It is gross that CAHSR chipped in $25 million for this.
Yep. I shake my head every time I drive by sections of this. The first sections will have begun to deteriorate before the first trains arrive. Epic waste. BUT, the drone work is top notch and we can all marvel at the embarrassing sunk cost fallacy as it progresses.🙄 I still remember the promotional commercials when they were trying to get approval for this. There was a comedian, Lewis Black, did one basically shaming people for being against it. Shameful indeed.
I love CHSR! I used to think like a nimby, but then I became an urbanist and I’m excited! We need to build out more rail experience to get costs down!
Greetings from a railfan from India. Nice videos, love the music!!
I have been looking at your and other videos of the construction progress of the CAHSR, and I am always left surprised at the slow pace of actual construction compared to developing countries. I am comparing to the first dedicated HSR in my home country and to Indonesia's recently opened line. Of course, it is cheaper to build and may be easier to acquire land/get permissions in developing countries. Even so Indonesia saw about 2-3years for getting permissions and acquiring the land, and in India it took close to 6years for that process to be completed. But I would have thought once construction contracts are given out, the actual pace of construction would not be that different. Of course I am not exactly an expert in how construction works and only know the broad strokes.
From what I have gathered online, construction for the CAHSR, at least the initial 120mile section, started as far back as 2016. 8years on, I would not call this a huge amount of progress. In comparison, in Indonesia actual construction on their 90mile section started in mid 2018 and opened for operations in late 2024. And construction was more challenging in Indonesia with 65miles being on viaducts and 10miles of tunnels.
To compare with India, where construction on 220/320miles only began in late 2020 while for the rest only in late 2023, the progress seems much better. Even in India, construction is more challenging with 90% of the 320miles being on viaducts. One section will have a 200+mile long viaduct, and another section includes a 13mile tunnel going under the sea and the major city of Mumbai. You can see monthly progress videos, not very detailed though, on NHSRCL's YT channel. The latest video is here: ruclips.net/video/eP-aTcmSeiY/видео.html
The only potential reason I can see is because construction is cheaper, contractors can use a lot more manpower and machinery to have more parallel construction happening at more sites.
PS: There is also a chance that it just "looks" slower in the case of California, due to the mostly at grade nature!!!
@@julupani oh it is slow for sure :-) There were a lot of environmental and legal battles. Here in the Central Valley, this is the easy part, geography wise. It's just that a lot of people here in the Central Valley did not want to give up farmland and so they resisted it and fought it as hard as they could. Even my hometown Hanford city government fought it. They did not want the station downtown. It's out in the country on the edge of town. You could compare it to a sibling rivalry, where one brother keeps taking the other brother's pencil, then laughs at his brother for being so slow at his homework.
In Indonesia, it is in fact very difficult to get things built as well. That is why the high speed rail system in Indonesia is more impressive still, because for decades many projects in Indonesia struggle due to land rights. Japan, a country famous for building rail systems, also has a difficult time too, if you can believe that. The new Shinkansen between Tokyo and Osaka (MAGLEV one) is bogged down in a land dispute through a small rural area. Besides that, you are right, things are extremely slow in California. Not only for civil engineering works, but even for residential construction or small business, one needs a lot of permits and layers of approval that often require hiring an attorney. My reasoned guess why it is like this--California is run by lawyers. Lawyers love to make laws and debate about them. Until we start electing engineers, I'm not hopeful for change. BTW, one of my favorite things about India is that they deployed relatively high speed rail at a low cost. Its an impressive achievement that more people should discuss and consider, instead of only chasing after the top dollar solutions for every scenario. Cheers.
In addition to the mentioned legal challenges, there's also challenges with utility relocations by local electric, water, gas, and freight rail companies, which limits completing some work, and also with getting sufficient labor due to limited per-year spending and challenges recruiting and training people. Generally workers on the job hangs out about 1500 per week these days, but it's been as low as a thousand or so, I think, which I think explains why you see some structures like the Dutch John Cut river bridges deprioritized for months or years on end to focus labor on the large and time-consuming elements like the Tule River pergola/viaduct, Hanford, or Conejo. Once those start wrapping up, a lot of those smaller elements should come together pretty fast, I think--a lot like the highway 41 bridge that Jason also did some drone footage of, which came together in about 6 months including demolition of the existing structure being replaced.
@@stevens1041 Land related issues will almost always be there for such large infrastructure projects, especially in federal and democratic setups. What I was referring to is the pace of construction post availability of land and permits.
@@rwdavidoff Yes, the limited spending per year is what I thought of as well. But to me it seems like it would be better financially to build faster, even if it is costlier, since it would mean that you would start seeing a return much sooner. On the people with training part, I think CAHSR should have taken on a partner with experience in HSR. Indonesia of course almost outsourced the whole thing to the Chinese. The Indian case is a bit different though, where the Japanese were involved in the technical design and will supply the trains and many other components, but the actual construction is being done by Indian contractors. The advantage of course was that with most of the Indian HSR being in tunnels or on viaducts, Indian contractors had built up a lot of experience with building those in the last 2 decades of building urban metro systems which were of similar design.
Once again thank you for the drone coverage of the Fresno area. Glad to see that the city is slowly moving to remove the Golden State roadway; maybe now they can start building the overpasses along the Union Pacific Right-of-way?
Awesome footage, dude! thank you for your work!
Wasn't expecting this up today! Thanks! I need to look at the Tulare and Ventura crossings a bit more and see if I can figure out what's delaying the railroad removing their shoofly diversion...if it's not just them being slow.
@@rwdavidoff I've been trying to fly them on Saturdays to hopefully catch any workers. Now, when it gets edited and published depends on what else I have going on for the rest of the weekend :-)
@@jasondroninaround Out of curiosity, what are you planning on doing after the last few sections (I estimate 3-4 left at 10-15 miles per section, given 12 miles on the north end, 27-29 on the south depending on re-flying Deer Creek). Starting the whole thing over seems like a big ask and not likely to show huge changes, but it'd be cool to get a look in on, say, Conejo, Tule River, Hanford, Deer Creek and Cross Creek, and downtown Fresno every few months. On the other hand, I don't know if RUclips makes it worth the time once your own personal curiosity about doing this series is satiated.
@@rwdavidoff Right now, the plan is start from the beginning and do it all over again but I think I'm going to fly it with little or no orbits. Just some little chicanes and video slow downs at the interesting parts. I should be able to cover a lot more ground in the same amount of video length.
@@rwdavidoff The drone flies about 26 mph, depending on if there's a head wind. Except for that last Fresno one, I've been running the video at 200% at the interesting parts and 800% in between. 800% of 26 mph is a little over 200 mph :-)
@@jasondroninaround That'd be really cool--honestly, I'm less worried about the length of the videos and more that it doesn't take more of your time than it's worth.
madera county should be a good one, i think we should start seeing construction in bakersfield city limits next year.
the IIJA funding covered the civil construction of the Bakersfield extension, so yeah construction should be happening in the next year or two. I'm pretty sure CHSRA has begun land acquisitions in that direction from Poplar Ave south.
I enjoyed the long, urban flyover. But it makes one appreciate how much work has yet to get underway! I try to be optimistic, but I wonder how many drones you are going to go through by the time this part of HSR is finished.
People don't realize how many water & sewer pipes, electrical conduits, buried telephone and fiber lines have to be dug up and moved before anything can be done. Some of the water and sewer lines have been there for 100+ years.
@@dfirth224 It's about time we replace them
Excellent work!
Thanks. Well done.
shaw ave grade separation about to start soon
McKinley and Shaw are being done at the same time. When they are done they will do Olive.
You'd think how much BNSF and UP are going to benefit from the traffic separation/cleared crossings, that they'd chip in a bit for the costs of road and bridge construction.
On the city grade separations like Shaw/Marks and Blackstone/McKinley the railroads pay 50% and the city pays 50%. Fresno is a poor city. Blackstone and McKinley should have been done 20 years ago. It was City Councilman Chris Mathys who got the ball rolling on the Shaw & Marks underpasses 20 years ago. His business is located nearby on Shaw and it was in his district. He was fed up with waiting on the trains everyday.
@@dfirth224 Thanks for the insight!
0:19 low speed rail at Florence Ave.
04:08 low speed rail at Fresno St
07:11 working on shit at Belmont Ave
11:16 low speed rail at the Union Pacific Yard
14:21 some open space between road and low speed rail
16:05 road parallelling low speed rail , interchange and cream my shorts! the dead end of high speed rail off in the distance!
16:22 end of the line - all passengers must fall off the edge here.
16:26 rail overpass. high speed rail crosses over low speed rail.
16:36 end of rail overpass. back to high speed rail.
16:47 end of high speed rail, back to dirt. slowly rotate drone to milk the footage.
17:02 show high speed rail from the other direction, back to rail overpass.
How many tracks to be installed? Two bi-directional?
Yes, 2 tracks is the design (whether they do that from the get-go is another question). The central valley stations , with the exception of Madera, will have four tracks (two platform tracks and two bypass tracks).
You're getting a really lot of distance - how are you able to keep your drone within range of the controller? Are you driving along side or something?
There are edits. This video was actually made out of nine separate videos.
@@squarebet6653 I try to stop the drone any specific spot that is easy to remember where I stopped it before I start the next video. I use a "smooth transition" in DaVinci Resolve to stitch them together. Depending on how well I matched the drone position of the previous video, the transition may or may not be easy to spot.
@@jasondroninaround Magical appearing train at 11:45, lol! (Nicely timed to the music, too)
@@mb_1024 there's two moving trains in this one and I think they magically appear both times. One work in the UP Yard and the other over by Veterans Boulevard
@@mb_1024 All the times I've been up and down this project that parallels those freight lines, I keep thinking to myself it'd be cool if I catch a train. Every stinking time the train will come through as I was driving my van between filming locations. I was so excited when I finally caught the freight trains in Fresno. I even caught two! That's why you see that Amtrak in Corcoran filmed with my cell phone. It's like they knew when the drone was in the air and they all stayed away. Only way I can catch one was with my cell phone :-)
This train is barely going to go from fresno to merced in my lifetime..
Hey, look at the thousands of people not working on it!
San Joaquin river viaduct is beautiful, but the thing right before it - the tunnel-like thing with the track laid on top of it diagonally is beyond ugly. Why did they do it like this?
@@TinLeadHammer this is where the high speed rail crosses over the Union Pacific line. It happens in a few places in this project. It crosses at a very shallow angle. So, there's really no pretty way of doing it.
What exactly is going on with that trench under the highway?
@@TheRailwayDrone you noticed how I didn't jerk the drone over there till the very last second. I was thinking did they dig under the highway? Hopefully somebody can answer that. Did they actually tunnel it? I'm sure they didn't close down the freeway for that. I was pretty far away or I would have flown lower to look through it and see if it was all the way through :-)
@@jasondroninaround I know they tunneled under the highway because I remember CAHSR posting a video showing the tunnel. But I don't understand what's happening past that like under that rail spur. I thought they were doing construction on that but it looks like they just stopped.
@@TheRailwayDrone It looks like they're they are building them a little detour for a moment to try to keep it open. Then they're going to tear out the old ones just enough to build the underground section. Then reopen the original line, tear out the little detour and build the rest of the underground section. I don't know where there are any plans but that seems logical to me
@@TheRailwayDrone and speaking of CA HSR drone guy, he has some smooth orbits in his videos :-) I've been trying to fly mine manual as much as possible. They say that once you get good at manual orbits, you can do them better than the automatic ones. For instance, when I transition from an orbit to a straight flight, that has to all be manual. Until I get better, it's a little wobbly but at least it's uncut
@@jasondroninaround I usually use the automated orbit because I know I'm not that great at it...yet.
Sadly, this has become such an embarrassment to the state of California. This is great footage. It shows how an ineffective government agency can ruin a plan to bring high-speed rail to central California.
The Veterans Boulevard interchange cost $140 million, $25 million from HSR funds. Think on that next time anyone starts whining about how much the rail project costs. Most of the expense is coming from the ten-lane climate arson features.
$140 million and they could not even build a protected bike lane...
What does ten lane climate arson features mean?
I really hate hyperbolic comments like this.
@@stevens1041 You are welcome to count the lanes on Veterans Blvd if you don't think there are ten. It is a car interchange that occupies 160 acres of prime land and the sole purpose of which is to enable car drivers who live outside city limits ten miles from central Fresno to speed around in their pickups. It is climate arson. It is gross that CAHSR chipped in $25 million for this.
what a waste of time, money and concrete!
Yep. I shake my head every time I drive by sections of this. The first sections will have begun to deteriorate before the first trains arrive. Epic waste. BUT, the drone work is top notch and we can all marvel at the embarrassing sunk cost fallacy as it progresses.🙄 I still remember the promotional commercials when they were trying to get approval for this. There was a comedian, Lewis Black, did one basically shaming people for being against it. Shameful indeed.
Building for tomorrow, billions spent today.
This is government at its best.
13,000 prevailing wage jobs currently.
@@Pab-Byep, actually unamerican to bet against future prosperity.
better investment than throwing money at Lockheed or the gravy train water welfare to California farmers
womp womp