Brightline trains from Las Vegas to suburban Los Angeles could be running by 2028.
Illustration by Angelica Alzona for Forbes; Photos by Pete Barrett/Forbes; Don Farrall/Getty ImagesThe billionaire investor and sports team owner wants to get you from Los Angeles to Vegas in about two hours. And he’s building a $12 billion, 186 MPH train line powered by renewable energy to do it.
By Alan Ohnsman, Forbes Staff
Wes Edens has a lot on his plate. The billionaire private equity investor who co-founded Fortress Investment Group also co-owns the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks, English Premier League’s Aston Villa football club and has a growing energy business that’s expanding from liquefied natural gas exports to making green hydrogen. He also thinks he’s figured out how to become something the U.S. has never seen: a high-speed rail baron.
“When you look at the systems in Japan, at the systems in China, nine major cities in Japan are connected with true high-speed rail; China has 26,000 miles of high-speed train routes. We have zero,” he told Forbes. But that could change in time for the 2028 Los Angeles Summer Olympic games if Brightline, the only private passenger rail service in the U.S., succeeds in setting up a second, separate railway far from Florida with electric bullet trains running between Las Vegas and L.A. at speeds of up to 186 miles per hour.
“Vegas-to-LA is probably the best system in the world that hasn't been built yet,” he said, given the heavy travel between the West Coast cities currently done by car and plane. “I don’t think it’s a get-rich-quick business. It’s more of a get-rich-very-slowly business. But the value you’re creating over years or generations I think will be tremendous. What I'm very focused on is it being viable economically because that means there'll be more of them.”
“It’s more of a get-rich-very-slowly business.”
Much as Elon Musk’s audacious plan to build a profitable, high-volume business around electric vehicles seemed like a pipedream when he unveiled it in 2006 but eventually happened—more than a decade later—Edens thinks he’s got a shot at dragging the U.S. into the high-speed train age. And his approach to building U.S. bullet trains is simple and differs dramatically from that taken by the struggling California High-Speed Rail Authority: situate them along existing highway corridors and lay steel tracks on the ground rather than on costly viaducts. Then, build train stations as destination commercial properties to generate additional revenue, which Edens has been trying to perfect at Brightline’s Miami Central Station the past few years with restaurants, bars and shops. (The company already has a 110-acre property in Las Vegas for its future station, commercial development and maybe even a stadium for a future Major League Soccer team Edens could be involved in.)
Brightline West's future Las Vegas rail station.
Grimshaw for BrightlineEdens thinks it will cost just $12 billion to create his 218-mile Brightline West system from Las Vegas to Rancho Cucamonga, a Southern California city linked to Los Angeles by an existing commuter train line. By comparison, the price tag for the state of California’s Los Angeles to San Francisco system has swelled to at least $108 billion over the past 15 years, with the first 171-mile phase connecting cities in the state’s Central Valley now expected to cost $35.3 billion when it opens in 2030. Plus, the entire Brightline West project will be electrified and use renewable energy.
The project is the “Holy Grail” of so-called environmental, social and governance-oriented (ESG) investing, Edens said. “When you're looking for ESG you're looking for things that are socially responsible, that actually help address climate change, helping inequities in the world. Now you have something that does that and also is economically viable and produces cashflow on a fairly short-term basis.”
Using Highway Medians
Brightline’s approach to railway building — avoiding traffic crossings or having to purchase large amounts of land by putting trains on the ground along freeways — “is certainly good in lots of ways,” said Eric Goldwyn, an assistant professor at NYU and program director of its Marron Institute of Urban Management. “As for median-running rail, it definitely makes sense. It’s not always obvious that state [governments] will allow for that, however.”
Brightline’s cost estimate of about $55 million per mile of track is in line with international cost estimates for new high-speed rail projects, Goldwyn said. Whether it can really be built for just $12 billion in less than five years remains to be seen.
Brightline's desert train would connect to L.A.'s Metrolink commuter rail system and, someday, California's high-speed train network.
BrightlineEthan Elkind, who tracks California transportation issues as director of the climate change program at the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment, is skeptical given that unforeseen challenges almost always arise with large-scale infrastructure projects.
“I don’t necessarily believe these initial cost estimates of the Vegas line,” Elkind said. “We’ll see if they are accurate and if Brightline has adequately assessed the challenges.”
Federal Grant Application
Edens, an admirer of 19th-century industrialist Henry Flagler whose Florida East Coast Railway and businesses helped create Miami and Palm Beach, is moving fast to get his West Coast train vision on track after a three-year delay due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
He discussed his rail empire plans with Forbes as Brightline celebrated the April 20 opening of its station at Orlando International Airport, which will connect passengers to Miami in three hours starting in July with trains running up to 125 mph. A day later, Brightline submitted a 4,000-page application to the Federal Railroad Administration, backed by Nevada and California, seeking $3.75 billion in grant funds for high-speed rail made available with 2021’s bipartisan infrastructure law to build Brightline West.
Edens will raise the additional $8 billion from private investors to construct tracks, electrical power lines and stations and purchase trains from a supplier with U.S. manufacturing operations. Siemens, which supplies trains for Brightline in Florida powered by renewable diesel, and Alstom, which makes Amtrak’s Acela trains, are contending to build electric locomotives for the Vegas line.
Power for the West Coast line will be supplied by massive solar farms that sprawl across California and Nevada desert and geothermal energy from the Salton Sea region. Brightline is currently negotiating power purchase agreements with independent producers and regional utilities.
“It'll be 100% electrified and will use renewable power,” Edens said. “It will literally be, not an embellishment, the greenest train in the world.”
“It will literally be, not an embellishment, the greenest train in the world.”
Putting the funding together may be the easy part, at least initially. Costs for multibillion-dollar infrastructure projects have a way of growing sharply, particularly when doing something for the first time. (Notably, the price tag for California’s bullet train has mushroomed from an initial estimate of about $30 billion in 2008 to three or even four times that amount.)
Brightline’s Florida system, which has cost $6 billion with the new connection to Orlando from Miami, stayed more or less on budget. However, it utilizes existing freight rail tracks in the southern portion, runs diesel-powered locomotives and isn’t a high-speed line, topping out at 125 mph.
Wildlife Crossings
The biggest problem the project has run into so far is the potential risk it poses to desert wildlife.
Environmentalists are concerned that concrete barriers planned to protect Brightline’s tracks in the median of the I-15 would make it impossible for bighorn sheep, desert tortoises, mountain lions and bobcats to move back and forth across the freeway—assuming they aren’t first crushed by cars and trucks.
The company, California’s Department of Fish and Wildlife and California Department of Transportation announced plans for three crossing points to address the matter in February. That will add some cost to the project, said Edens, who estimates Brightline has spent $600 million so far for planning and engineering costs ahead of construction.
Neal Desai, a senior director with the National Parks Conservation Association, which has pushed the railway to incorporate animal-friendly design features for years, isn’t satisfied with the current plan.
“Highways have always been, to some degree, a barrier, but (Brightline’s concrete walls) would make it impenetrable,” he said. The February agreement for crossings “is just an agreement to work towards doing that. It doesn't guarantee it's going to happen.”
So last month, California Senator Dianne Feinstein asked Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigiegg to ensure that any federal funds for the train project require Brightline to build and maintain those crossings for many years to come.
“I am deeply concerned that there are numerous ways that this agreement could dissolve due to any lack of requisite funding, potential project delays beyond the two-year life of the agreement,” Feinstein said in a letter. “It is essential, therefore, that these mitigation measures be required in federal permitting documents.”
From DesertXpress To Virgin To Brightline West
Edens didn’t dream up the idea of building a train between Las Vegas and Los Angeles. It began in the early 2000s as a startup dubbed DesertXpress and then renamed XpressWest in 2012. Edens bought the company in 2018 as he was starting up his Florida railway, attracted by the fact that XpressWest had negotiated the necessary right-of-way to run trains down the I-15 and support in Washington for the project by boosters, including former Nevada Senator Harry Reid. For a few years, he planned to operate the line in a marketing agreement with Richard Branson’s Virgin Enterprises, but that alliance ended in 2020 and he redubbed the system Brightline West.
Edens previously lined up $4.2 billion in federal infrastructure bonds for the project in early 2020, provided by California and Nevada, and was preparing to raise billions of dollars more from private investors when the pandemic hit. While it pushed back the start of construction by three years, planning work didn’t stop. The original 180-mile line ended in Victorville, California, up to two hours east of Los Angeles in the desert, a remote location that made the rail line less compelling. The company used the unanticipated pause to win agreements to add a 49-mile extension to Rancho Cucamonga, a city about an hour east of downtown Los Angeles but connected to that sprawling city by the Metrolink commuter line. That boosted the total cost of the original project by a few billion dollars but also made it more appealing.
Given the estimated 50 million people who travel between Los Angeles and Las Vegas annually, 85% by car, Edens sees a massive built-in market.
“You'll move about 3 million cars off the road. That's 20% of the current car traffic between Vegas and L.A.,” Edens said. “This thing creates the blueprint for how you replicate this in 20 different places around the country or more.”
“You'll move about 3 million cars off the road. That's 20% of the current car traffic between Vegas and L.A.”
He sees several attractive opportunities to do similar highway-adjacent train lines connecting other large cities 200 to 300 miles apart—a bit too far to drive and a bit too close to fly. These include Dallas and Houston, Atlanta and Charlotte, Las Vegas and Phoenix, Chicago and Minneapolis and Seattle and Portland.
NYU’s Goldwyn is a bit skeptical about how many intercity routes will ultimately be feasible for the company in terms of avoiding the need to acquire private land and avoid the types of eminent domain and environmental approval headaches that have bedeviled California’s bullet train project.
The first-class cabin on Brightline's Florida railway.
Photo by Jeffrey Greenberg/UCG/Universal“The Houston-Dallas route certainly is very interesting, but I've seen a couple of other pairs (of cities) that I'm not as confident about,” he said. “If you can get the costs right, I think you can do it. If it costs you $100 billion for every project, you're not going to build any of these projects. If you can do it for $10 billion or so, we can assemble that money — especially if you're bringing the private sector in and this guy's good at that stuff.”
As Brightline awaits approval of its federal grant application, it’s already lined up significant, high-powered support for the West Coast line from labor groups and Democratic and Republican politicians across California and Nevada, including U.S. Senator Jacky Rosen.
“I urged them to swiftly review the application from the Nevada Department of Transportation to make sure we can start construction as soon as possible," Rosen told Forbes. “Travel and tourism are key parts of Nevada’s economy, and this high-speed rail project stands to bring millions more visitors to Southern Nevada each year while also easing traffic congestion on I-15."
Brain Kelly, head of the California High-Speed Rail project, also highly supports what Brightline is doing and hopes that it will eventually link up with the state’s line at a future station in Palmdale, a city north of the state Los Angeles.
“There are very good opportunities for us to do some things together,” Kelly said during a California State Assembly hearing this month. “We would likely be the first two entities in America that would try to procure electrified high-speed trains. There may be great efficiencies and economies of scale if we do that together. That may be a better way to move the manufacturing of electrified high-speed trains to America by having a bigger procurement that we both may undertake.”
Mike Reinigner, Brightline’s CEO, knows there are likely to be unforeseen problems after construction of the West Coast begins, particularly since it’s a first-of-its-kind project. But he’s ready for them. “When you start to do something that hasn't been done before you get to experience what our chairman (Edens) likes to call the `pioneer premium’ — mud in your face and arrows in your back,” he said at the opening of the Orlando station last week.
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