Potemkin Railhead: At What Point Do We Just Call This Fraud?

Three months ago, California Governor Gavin Newsom announced an extraordinary achievement. Standing on the site of a new railyard, with trains all around him, Newsom proudly explained that the state’s high-speed rail project had a new marshaling facility to support the transition to busily laying track. Screenshot from the video I just linked to:

Now, this video is also three months old, and you’ll notice something interesting if you watch it:

It shows a bunch of buildings, a bunch of construction materials, and a bunch of activity on the railhead site. But it’s animated. All of that was created on a computer, while the video sort of vaguely describes it as things that exist, over a caption that acknowledges that you’re looking at a “conceptual rendering.”

The news was all about the huge milestone, the massive new accomplishment, and the high-speed rail project kicking into high gear:

Facility completed. “The track-laying stage,” those stories said. Remember this image, a screenshot from a High-Speed Rail Authority brochure, because you’re about to see it again from a different angle:

That’s Merced Avenue over on the right side of that image. I just stood under that overpass.

Two weeks ago, talking to Bill Maher, Newsom defended the high-speed rail project with these words: “We’re actually laying track.” The railhead is the signal that a new phase has arrived: There’s a construction yard full of material, with trains to move it. It’s the really-making-stuff moment, the time for active, provable success. There’s a place where you can go look at all the iron that’s moving into place.

So.

The fence just ends, so you don’t have to jump it. You can walk around it.

There’s nothing there. There are rail lines, but they run into an empty and unpeopled yard next to a bunch of dirt. There are no construction materials. There are no construction workers. There are no warehouses. They ran a bunch of trains in, posed in front of them, and then returned the site to its normal empty condition. Nothing is happening there. Nothing.

I walked the site. I walked up and down the tracks, worried that I was missing something. I drove up to Wasco, then back, up and down dirt roads along the tracks — old tracks, for BNSF freight trains.

There’s an empty rail yard, some stranded concrete structures, and a sign that declares victory.

The railyard where Gavin Newsom declared “real progress” while standing next to train cars is the center of no construction activity at all. I walked around the fence and stood on the tracks today in the empty yard. I was alone.