California takes first step to buy trains for its high-speed rail route. What’s the price tag?

At least three global manufacturers of high-speed trains have shown interest in selling electric-powered trainsets to California, but more may weigh in as the state moves through its purchase process.

The California High-Speed Rail Authority issued a request for qualifications in August for companies interested in bidding to not only provide trains for the planned rail system, but also related services such as maintenance. It’s the first step in a two-part process in which the rail agency will create a short list of qualified companies and then seek formal bids for the contract for trains and the associated services.

First, however, California will need help from the federal government to pay for the trains. And another agency’s ongoing purchase of new trainsets on the East Coast is experiencing significant hiccups that have delayed the program by three years and created cost increases – a potential cautionary tale for California’s program, which has been fraught with schedule delays and cost increases since the first contract was awarded in August 2013 for construction of the route in the Fresno region.

The rail authority has an estimated budget of about $561 million for the contract to buy six trainsets and 30 years of maintenance. Each trainset consists of multiple cars and electric power units that will be fed by overhead electrical lines and capable of operating at speeds up to 220 mph and testing at up to 242 mph.

The state anticipates ordering two prototype trainsets for delivery in 2028 to test not only the trains, but the tracks and systems on the route now under construction in the central San Joaquin Valley.

The delivery of the remaining four trainsets would be expected by 2030, when the rail authority hopes to begin carrying passengers on its initial operating segment between Merced and Bakersfield, by way of stations in Fresno and Hanford. The request for qualifications also includes a possible option to buy six additional trainsets.

The request for qualifications does not include specifications for what California wants in its trains beyond the speed requirements. As the agency first contemplated a train purchase a decade ago, however, plans called for trains to be about 660 feet long and able to carry 450 to 500 passengers. Each trainset would have a control cab at either end with passenger cars in the middle; two trainsets could be linked nose-to-tail to create a quarter-mile-long double train capable of hauling 900 to 1,000 passengers in periods of peak demand.

Hyundai Rotem USA Corporation, Alstom Transport US, and Siemens Mobility Inc. are the three train-buiding companies that participated in an online pre-bid conference to learn more about the project, along with a host of would-be members of contracting teams.

Who are the would-be players?

Hyundai Rotem USA is part of South Korea’s Hyundai Motor Group, while Alstom Trans port US, with a plant in New York, is a subsidiary of French rolling-stock manufacturer Alstom SA. Siemens Mobility, which has a manufacturing plant in Sacramento, is part of German multinational company Siemens AG.

The pre-bid conference was not a mandatory event for would-be bidders for the train contract, so other companies may still submit qualification statements by the time they are due in mid-November.

The trio of high-speed rail heavyweights are among about a dozen companies around the world responsible for building the vast majority of what the International Union of Railways reports are about 3,200 trainsets that operate at speeds that the international organization defines as Category 1 high-speed rail of at least 155 mph – none of which are in the U.S.

The rail authority isn’t putting up any money now toward the train purchase. That will come later, after the agency issues its formal request for bids in the first part of 2024 and sees which companies actually step forward with proposals, said Bruce Armistead, chief of rail and operations delivery for the rail authority.

Once awarded, the contract will also include a driving simulator on which operators will learn how to maneuver the trains.

“In addition to the trainsets and driving simulator, the contractor will be required to participate in the testing and commissioning of facilities, track and systems, and support the certification and commissioning of the trainsets,” Armistead told the agency’s board of directors in August.

One key componentof any contractor bidding to build and sell the trains is “Buy America” requirements for the trains to be manufactured in the U.S. But currently, no train manufacturer is building anything on American soil to run at speeds of at least 200 mph.

Learning from Amtrak’s experience

The California High-Speed Rail Authority isn’t the only agency in the U.S. looking at buying high-speed trains. Brightline, which operates some intercity rail services at more than 100 mph in Florida, is in the process of developing its own Brightline West privately operated high-speed rail route between Los Vegas and Southern California and will need its own fleet of trains.

Amtrak is buying 28 trains from Alstom as part of a $2.3 billion program to modernize its fleet of Acela high-speed trainsets on the Northeast Corridor route between Boston and Washington, D.C. Amtrak’s new Acela trains are expected to operate at a top speed of 160 mph. But only a few stretches of the Northeast Corridor are able to accommodate trains at those speeds.

The deployment of those new Acela trains is more than three years behind schedule, however. An audit report issued last week by Amtrak’s inspector general indicated that Alstom has not come up with validated computer modeling to show that the new trains are safe for additional testing. “Without a validated model, (the Federal Railroad Administration) will not let (Amtrak) move forward with the rest of its required testing,” the audit report stated. “Until the company completes testing, the trainsets cannot operate in revenue service – let alone at the advertised speed of 160 miles per hour.”

The report also noted that the 12 trainsets and 22 cafe cars produced so far by Alstom for Amtrak all have defects.

As a result, Amtrak has yet to formally accept delivery of any of the new Alstom trainsets.

“As we look to the Amtrak high-speed trainset procurement, there are lessons learned regarding trainset testing that we will put into practice for our procurement,” Armistead, the California agency’s rail delivery chief, said in August.

He pledged that the agency will work with the Federal Railroad Administration on the early development of a validated computer model to simulate how the trains would behave on the tracks – one of the stumbling blocks in the Amtrak train purchase. And Armistead said the authority’s staff would be embedded with the team responsible for train-track testing “to drive accountability and efficiencies.”

California and Amtrak spent more than a year discussing the potential of doing a joint purchase of trainsets in 2013 and 2014. But after issuing a call for bids in January 2014, the two agencies decided to go their separate ways because their needs were too different from one another.

Amtrak and California each hoped that joining forces on an order of at least 42 trains – and potentially dozens more – would be attractive enough for international manufacturers of high-speed rail equipment to commit to building trains in the U.S. as required by the federal government’s Buy America laws. Amtrak and the California rail agency also wanted to leverage an economy of scale that might create a lower price tag for each train set.

Where the money would come from for California to pay for the trains was another issue in 2014 – and remains one today.

The state rail agency has a grant application pending with the U.S. Department of Transportation, seeking $2.8 billion to accelerate completion of the Merced-Fresno-Bakersfield operating segment and including money to buy the six high-speed trainsets.