Fresno and the San Joaquin Valley are at the epicenter of high-speed rail development in California, as construction lumbers ahead on a 119-mile stretch from the northern fringe of Madera to the Kern County community of Shafter.

And leaders in Fresno, Merced and Bakersfield have high hopes for what the rail line — and the stations that will be located in their downtown districts — will mean for their economies.

But, 17 years after voters approved a $10 billion bond measure to help pay for the project and a decade since construction began in the Central Valley, California high-speed rail faces a pivotal year that could make or break the ambitious yet controversial project.

The project, already beset by an ever-escalating price tag and a schedule that has slipped well beyond initial expectations, faces more potential turmoil when former President Donald Trump returns to the White House on Monday.

Based on Trump’s actions during his first term, the California High-Speed Rail Authority and Gov. Gavin Newsom anticipate continued antagonism from the Trump administration, as well as a possible shutoff of federal funding for the project. Additionally, one of Trump’s key advisors, tech billionaire Elon Musk, has long been a critic of California’s efforts, criticizing the state’s project as too costly and slow to show progress.

“No one’s naive about the headwinds that are coming our way, but we withstood those a few years back,” Newsom said earlier this month, “and we were able to continue to move forward and I have all the confidence in the world that we will move forward.”

With so much at stake in 2025, here’s everything we know about the status of California’s high-speed rail project, based on 15 years of coverage and more than 300 stories published by The Bee.

How California’s high-speed rail project got started

In 2008, when voters approved Proposition 1A, a $9.9 billion high-speed rail bond measure, the pitch was to build a fully electric-powered system of passenger trains from San Francisco to Los Angeles, by way of the San Joaquin Valley.

The line would have its own set of electrified tracks, separated from existing passenger and freight rail lines up and down the state. The ballot measure’s requirements included the capability for trains to operate at up to 220 mph and make a nonstop trip between downtown San Francisco and downtown Los Angeles in no more than 2 hours 40 minutes.

A future second phase would extend the statewide system north to Sacramento and south through the Inland Empire to San Diego.

But the rail program has encountered several problems that have pushed its estimated completion date well beyond what state leaders and residents envisioned:

•An abundance of lawsuits over issues ranging from the use of state funds to the adequacy of environmental reports.

•Deadlines associated with spending billions of dollars of federal grants during the Obama administration that created a rush to begin work before much of the necessary planning and engineering work had been done.

•A painstakingly slow pace of buying right-of-way needed for construction..

•Change orders to contractors that have tacked hundreds of millions of dollars onto the project’s cost.

All of those issues and more set set in motion a domino-like series of circumstances that continue to plague the project.

Costs have climbed. The project’s scope has been scaled down. The construction schedule has been fraught with years of slippage. State officials once carried the rosy expectation that passengers would be whisked from S.F. to L.A. via bullet trains as early as 2020. Now, they expect its “initial operating segment” from Merced to Bakersfield will launch no earlier than 2030 and perhaps as late as 2033.

The concerns have fueled skepticism and shaken confidence that the state can deliver what Prop. 1A promised.

Why projected construction costs keep climbing

Cost has been an ever-changing aspect of the project. What was forecast in 2008 as a cost of about $33 billion to build the 520-mile route from San Francisco to Los Angeles has ballooned to a high-end estimate of about $128 billion.

Of course, the changing price tag has not been just one giant upward leap. Sometimes it’s been gradual, sometimes abrupt, and — on rare occasions — adjusted downward.

• In 2009, in a report to the state Legislature, the estimate was revised upward to about $42.6 million — a figure that accounted for inflation.

• By 2011, new leadership at the rail authority acknowledged that the 2008 and 2009 estimates were “a little bit optimistic.” “We know more now,” then-authority CEO Roelof van Ark told The Fresno Bee. “When you start designing systems like this, you look at the alignment, the cities, the rural areas, and you make assumptions. ... [But] you don’t have the detail to consider what real costs are going to come about.”

• In late 2011, a draft business plan sent shock waves through the state when the construction forecast jumped even higher, to an eye-popping $98.1 billion, accounting for inflation through 2033.

• By April 2012, plans for the system went through a “value engineering” overhaul: sharing tracks with commuter rail systems along the San Francisco Peninsula between San Jose and San Francisco as well as in the Los Angeles area — measures that bought the inflation-adjusted cost down to about $68 billion in a best-case scenario.

• For several years, the price tag wobbled in the mid-$60 billion range. But in 2018, the cost estimate lurched upward again, to about $77.3 billion for the San Francisco-Los Angeles stage.

The agency’s forecast from its 2024 business plan is presented as a range from $88.5 billion to $127.9 billion. The chasm between the low and high estimates reflects uncertainty over what it could ultimately cost to build beyond Bakersfield and Merced.

Expanding high-speed rail beyond the Central Valley would require burrowing through the Diablo mountain range at Pacheco Pass to reach the Bay Area or through the Tehachapi and San Gabriel mountain ranges into the Los Angeles basin.

In 2019, confronted with the project’s harsh fiscal reality, Newsom directed that work concentrate on building an operational, passenger-carrying initial line between Bakersfield and Merced, where passengers could connect with existing Amtrak trains and a future southern terminus for the Altamont Corridor Express commuter rail service to San Jose via Altamont Pass.

How the bullet train project’s schedule and scope changed

Prop. 1A offered the vision of an 800-mile train system linking San Francisco and Sacramento in northern California with Los Angeles and San Diego to the south, all by way of the San Joaquin Valley.

The initial expectation in 2008 was that construction for the 520-mile Phase 1 SF-to-LA stage could commence by 2012 and be completed by about 2017, with passenger operations potentially beginning as early as 2022.

Now, a much-abbreviated vision calls for electric trains to begin carrying passengers from Merced to Bakersfield sometime between 2030 and 2033 — as many as 25 years after voters approved Prop. 1A — with no timetable offered for the extensions to the Bay Area or the Los Angeles basin, let alone to Sacramento or San Diego.

Money was the primary reason that planners with the rail authority proposed in 2010 to use about $4.3 billion in federal and state funds to begin construction with a 54-mile stage between Borden, an obscure spot on the map south of Madera, and the Kings County community of Corcoran. Planners reasoned that starting work on a largely rural, relatively flat and seemingly uncomplicated stretch would provide more bang for the limited bucks than in a congested urban area such as the San Francisco or Los Angeles.

Even rail experts in Spain, which opened its first high-speed rail line in 1992 and is perhaps the closest global parallel to California’s plan, told The Bee in 2011 that they were puzzled about the logic of beginning construction in the sparsely populated center of the state. The environmental benefits — such as reduced air pollution from automobile traffic — would not be realized if the cities along the first section of the route don’t have enough people to generate a large ridership.

The Obama-era Federal Railroad Administration, though, required the California High-Speed Rail Authority to begin construction in the San Joaquin Valley in order to receive early grant funds. Federal officials wanted to provide the greatest economic stimulus in an area slowly recovering from the Great Recession. Officials with the state rail authority, however, later acknowledged they asked the FRA to include that condition in its grant agreements.

Another condition of the grants was that construction of the rail line through the Valley had to be completed by fall 2017. That forced the agency into an artificially compressed time frame to award construction contracts even before it had acquired the properties it needed for right of way. That deadline was later renegotiated with the FRA to require only that the federal money be spent by late 2017.

The Obama administration redirected additional high-speed rail money rejected by Wisconsin and Ohio, allowing the rail authority to extend the route from north of Madera to northwest of Bakersfield over three separate construction contracts.

But financial realities and political concerns prompted significant changes to the original plans for construction in the Valley — from a railway with major stretches of viaducts carrying trains high above ground level to an at-grade line with over- and underpasses to eliminate at-grade crossings.

Additionally, the prospect of a full Phase 1 line from San Francisco to Los Angeles was scaled back considerably — first in 2012 for initial operations between Merced and Burbank. Officials pivoted in 2016 to move north from Bakersfield to San Jose in what was dubbed a “Valley-to-Valley” line connecting the San Joaquin Valley to Silicon Valley.

Newsom, in his 2019 State of the State address, announced that efforts scale back further and, instead, would be focused on completing an interim operating line between Merced and Bakersfield. The governor said the project would only advance beyond the Central Valley when or if the state could secure more money from the federal government or private investors.

Newsom’s announcement prompted President Trump to falsely declare on social media that the governor had canceled California’s project and demand a refund of $3.5 billion in federal funds. The Trump administration canceled a grant of nearly $1 billion later that year, which was restored by the Biden administration in 2021.

Why high-speed rail may run out of funding

The original 2008 pitch for Prop. 1A anticipated that about one-third of the money to build California’s bullet-train system would come from the state bond, another one-third from the federal government, and the remaining one-third from private investment.

Since then, Republicans in Congress introduced bills attempting to bar future federal funds for the project. And while the rail authority has sought to drum up interest from international investors for infrastructure, there have been no firm commitments from anyone to pony up money.

Until the Biden administration provided more than $3.3 billion from the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the state had been funding construction through a combination of the Prop. 1A bonds and cap-and-trade money from California’s greenhouse gas-reduction program.

Cap-and-trade money comes from companies who bid at state auctions to buy credits to offset their air pollution emissions. The “cap” part of the cap-and-trade program is the limits that are placed on polluters’ emissions, and companies are required to get permits for each ton of carbon they produce as air emissions. The “trade” part comes from the ability of companies to trade for additional pollution capacity, buying allowances through auctions or from private sellers whose pollution comes in under their cap.

Absent more federal money or private funds, cap-and-trade — identified in 2012 as a Plan B funding option — remains the only ongoing source of money to fund construction in the Valley.

Cap-and-trade funds raised about $6.4 billion for high-speed rail construction from 2012 to 2023. That funding source will expire in 2030 unless it is extended by the California Legislature.

What would happen if the project doesn’t get built?

Even as the project remains nebulous to many Californians, high-speed rail officials say they’ve made noticeable progress in recent years.

They point to the fact that, in 2024, the project’s Phase 1 from San Francisco to Los Angeles reached full environmental clearance, with pre-construction planning underway in the Bay Area segments.

Officials also say they’re on track to buy six sets of trains for high-speed rail service and begin initial testing in 2028.

Work has been completed on 22 miles of the route in Kern County, setting the stage for the start of laying down steel tracks and systems for signals and safety. Work continues on the route between Madera and the Tulare-Kern county line with completion forecast in 2026.

But California’s high-speed rail project faces difficult questions this year that could decide whether the ambitious bullet-train system ever gets built.

What if state legislators turn off the tap on cap-and-trade money?

What if neither Congress nor Trump or future presidents toss another dime California’s way for the project?

What if California can’t find the money to build out the entire statewide bullet train system?

And, what will become of the overpasses, viaducts, trenches and other infrastructure now under construction in Fresno, Madera, Kings, Tulare and Kern counties if they’re not used for bullet trains?

The answer lies in the original grant agreement between the Federal Railroad Administration and the state for stimulus and railroad money.

If cap-and-trade was Plan B for funding, then the plan of last resort is a clause in the contracts requiring “independent utility” for the stretch of the rail line being built in the Valley.

Here’s what that means: If no tracks are ever laid nor trainsets purchased for the project beyond Merced to the north or Bakersfield to the south, the tracks could be used by Amtrak’s San Joaquin trains that currently share the BNSF Railway freight tracks between Madera and Bakersfield.

The result: Almost 170 miles of tracks with no at-grade street crossings and on which Amtrak trains need not stop for passing freight trains. Amtrak could operate at faster speeds — potentially as fast as 125 mph, compared to the current top speed of 79 mph and average speed of 53 mph for the San Joaquin trains.

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