High-speed train proposal not dead, just on slow track

It sounds like something from a summer science-fiction flick. Imagine a high-speed train zooming across the Mojave Desert between Las Vegas and Los Angeles at speeds exceeding 250 miles per hour.

The train isn't even on rails; rather, it levitates magnetically from a single-track rail, making derailment virtually impossible. Riders travel between the cities in an hour and 10 minutes -- faster than door-to-door jet travel between the locations today.

For more than a decade, this train -- called the maglev project, after magnetic levitation -- has been bandied about by politician after politician in the Las Vegas Valley as a panacea for the traffic buildup occurring on Interstate 15 between here and Los Angeles.

Though many think it's dead, the maglev project is still alive. And the problem it's trying to address may become even more obvious in the next five years as the city adds 20,000 hotel rooms while I-15 remains the same. Already on holiday weekends, it can take Southern Californians up to seven hours to make the 250-mile road trip.

As the years have passed with no sign of a high-speed train, valley residents assumed the project was dead, Las Vegas City Councilman Arnie Adamsen said. He serves as chief financial officer on the California-Nevada Superspeed Ground Transportation Commission.

Maglev was pushed even further back into the shadows when the demand for a monorail on the Strip was pushed to the forefront. While the monorail project received $155 million in federal funding, maglev is still floundering in Washington's red tape.

"It's not dead," Adamsen said. "We've just kept it quiet."

Projects that cost large amounts of money can take more than 20 years to be completed, Adamsen said. For example, the Denver airport that opened a couple of years ago was the first major airport built in the country since the mid-'70s when the Dallas/Fort Worth facility was constructed.

"We don't want the public to have too high of expectations when it might not happen for years," he said, estimating the soonest that construction could start would be late 2002 or early 2003.

The single most prohibitive factor maglev faces is its cost -- somewhere in the $6 billion range for the proposed 272-mile track between Las Vegas and Anaheim. But no one knows for sure, since only one such project has been built as a demonstration train between Berlin and Hamburg in Germany. There, rides cost $12 per passenger and the waiting list to use the service is a year long.

In Washington, national legislation has given investors incentives to put money into bonds that would fund the train. But private partnerships also would be needed to get the project rolling because of its estimated cost of about $20 million a mile to develop.

Another hurdle is competition with other cities for the demonstration train in the United States. Though Las Vegas and California have been working on plans for the train for years, other cities also have thrown their hats in the ring. Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Orlando are some cities eyeing proposals for a maglev train.

The recent allocation of transportation funds in the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act in Washington didn't include any money for a maglev project in any particular city. Instead, it allocated $60 million for cities to submit proposals and for studies to be conducted. Then it gave Congress the OK to approve $900 million for the city that eventually gets the project.

It's not the first time Congress has approved money for maglev -- in 1991 it approved $700 million for the demonstration project.

The secretary of transportation will review the proposals and studies and will eventually be the one to decide which city gets maglev. Members of Nevada's congressional delegation say it should be about six months to a year before the site is selected.

And since the East Coast traditionally has more political clout in the nation's capital, the worry is that Nevada -- the only state in the West asking for the train -- will get short shrift.

"There's always that concern that we'll get muscled out politically," Adamsen said. "But Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is our 800-pound gorilla."

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