Golden State Spurn: Trump DOT chief reroutes California rail money to train safety elsewhere

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced Friday $5.3 billion in investments to improve national rail safety and upgrade Amtrak trains, diverting nearly half the money from California's disastrously overpriced and stalled high-speed rail project championed by Gov. Gavin Newsom.

About $2 billion of the new Federal Railroad Administration investment will come from savings from Duffy's decision to end federal support for the California project, which exploded to become seven times over budget and years delayed.

"I would love to see America have high-speed rail. I'm an advocate of it and for it," Duffy told the Just the News, No Noise television show. "But when California has an initial cost estimate of $33 billion, but over the course of more than a decade, they don't lay one track. And by the way, the cost projection now for that rail is $231 billion.

"Listen, we're not going to invest in projects that don't deliver for the American people. We're going to invest in the projects that actually show that the hard work of an American taxpayer there's a deliverable for the money that they give us, and so that's one example," he said.

Duffy told Just the News that the new funding will:

• Close over 30 train crossings and upgrade over a thousand with new infrastructure and technology
• Purchase 43 Made-in-America train sets to replace Amtrak’s aging fleet
• Overhaul 41 locomotives currently serving Amtrak’s Midwest and Pacific routes.

"One of the most dangerous things that happen in rail is when vehicles cross the rail track," he said. "Eliminating many of those and deploying new technology improves safety. So some really cool things are happening," Duffy explained. "But here's a different philosophy as well. Our infrastructure is rated at about a C-minus, and we should have A infrastructure in America."