Suppose you want to get from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. By car, this will take about four hours. Mostly you’ll stick to Route 15, cruising through flat desert with only scattered development in between. You could also fly; this can be as inexpensive as $25 one-way, but requires getting to LAX, passing through security, and risking delayed flights — then finding ground transport from Harry Reid International Airport to wherever you’re staying in Vegas. Including the 90-minute flight, this process might not be much faster than driving. You could also take Greyhound, but times are variable (up to seven hours), and a ticket could easily cost more than a budget flight.
But almost anything is better than taking Amtrak between these two cities. At the moment, the full route takes at least 12 hours, and one coach ticket can cost more than four times as much as a typical Spirit flight. And although you’re booking through Amtrak, the largest passenger rail network in the U.S., this journey includes “mixed service,” which means you’ll not only transfer in Oxnard, California, but you’ll ride the second leg on a bus. By the time you step aboard this cumbersome vehicle and pull onto the dusty highway, you may start wishing you’d hitchhiked instead.
All that’s about to change, thanks to the construction of a new high-speed train between the two popular cities. The new line, called Brightline West, will connect downtown Los Angeles to Rancho Cucamonga — a suburb northeast of L.A. — and then continue straight to Sin City. Total time: two hours and 10 minutes. The same way this long-awaited Amtrak train now offers high-speed rides on the east coast, this west coast bullet train should reach speeds of 218 miles per hour.
Next high speed train arrives in 2028
Railroad fans will have to wait until at least 2028, when the new line is scheduled to start operations, and it would be shocking if the project didn’t face one delay or another. Yet Brightline West is more than just talk: The plan has been approved and entered a serious construction phase in 2025…