There was an update, of sorts, on Monday about the California High-Speed Rail project, two weeks ahead of the inauguration of Donald Trump — which will usher in another era of Republican middle fingers held high in the direction of such projects that aren't in their states.

Governor Gavin Newsom and some transportation officials held a news conference in Kern County Monday, which you can watch below (warning: the sound quality on the microphone is very bad), essentially to remind everyone that the High-Speed Rail project is still alive, not dead yet, and plugging along despite an uncertain funding future. It remains, for now, a rail link between two ends of the Central Valley, with connections to the Bay Area and into the Los Angeles basin still many years, and many billions of dollars away from becoming a reality.

The press event was also to call attention to a proposal, which has been floated for a while now by the High Desert Corridor Joint Powers Agency, to construct a 54-mile link between the planned high-speed rail station in Palmdale — part of the Phase 2 that would be the first segment bringing the rail line from Bakersfield toward LA — to Victorville, which would allow riders to link up to the privately funded Brightline West high-speed line to Las Vegas.

That proposal is under environmental review, and it would have the added benefit of, eventually, connecting Brightline West's trains to Los Angeles itself — at the moment, construction is set to begin only a segment that terminates in Rancho Cucamonga, outside of LA County.

Kind of shifting focus away from the planned high-speed rail segments linking up Sacramento and Bay Area, which are likely decades away, the new chief executive of the high-speed rail authority, Ian Choudri, said Monday, "The future for high-speed rail in the Southwest is bright. It’s happening, and we are proud to be at the forefront of this transformation in transportation."

The ~$18 billion Brightline West project is set to begin construction soon, and it could begin taking passengers before California's high-speed rail line does — riding between Merded to Bakersfield might begin by 2030.

Newsom struck a sober tone about the project Monday, selling it as a broader economic development and job creation effort — for the Central Valley at least.

"I’ve never thought of this, fundamentally, as a project that’s just about rail," Newsom said. "It’s about economic development. It’s about creating a sense of place. It’s about upzoning around the rail. It’s about infrastructure."

Adding to this point, officials included a construction worker on the rail line among the speakers at Monday's event, who spoke about other workers having kids and raising families all while working on he rail line.

Discussing the "cynicism" many express about the project, and past political decision — like to route the rail line through the more densely populated eastern side of the Central Valley, instead of the less populated I-5 corridor, which would have been logistically far easier — Newsom said, "We can’t go back. We just have to accept the responsibility of where we are, and that’s exactly what we are doing."

Federal funding seems all but certain to dry up for at least the next four years, with Trump in the White House and Republicans controlling Congress. As the Los Angeles Times notes, this had state Senator Dave Cortese [D-San Jose] putting out a pragmatic statement Monday, pushing for public-private partnerships to ferry the rail project along.

"I am unwilling to let the uncertain funding connected to the renewal of state cap-and-trade and the challenges with the Trump Administration go unaddressed," Cortese said. "The way to do this is through tried-and-true public-private partnerships that have historically funded transportation projects in every major city throughout the state of California."

The nearly 30-year-old high-speed rail project has had many ups and downs over the years, and with every passing year construction costs only continue to rise and its completions seems more uncertain. Given the lawsuits and bureaucratic morass that the project has gone through, it's come to symbolize just how difficult major infrastructure projects like this are in the 21st Century, compared to the mid-20th when such projects were completed more efficiently.

As of June 2024, the high-speed rail project has full environmental approvals for all three segments that will connect San Francisco, the Central Valley, and Los Angeles, which was a milestone in and of itself. A year ago at this time, we were looking at renderings of the insides of rail cars, and last May, under the more transit-friendly Biden administration, we saw the feds kicking down $3.4 billion to save the floundering downtown extension project in San Francisco — the expensive underground tunnel, now dubbed The Portal, that will eventually connect the rail tracks at 4th and King streets to Salesforce Transit Center.

Meanwhile Newsom, who could be eyeing a presidential bid in 2028, doesn't want the stink of this albatross sticking to him, and thus he's been downplaying the full completion idea since he took office in 2019, preferring to focus on the benefits that will come to the Central Valley alone — even though connecting Merced to Bakersfield with a very expensive train was never really the point.

Previously: High-Speed Rail Now Has Full Environmental Approvals For SF-to-LA Route