The Chinese High Speed Rail Delivery Team is among 35 U.S. and foreign entities that expressed their interest in participating in the California High-Speed Rail (CHSR) program, according to a list released Tuesday by the CHSR Authority.
Other companies and teams that expressed their interest included the Japan California High-Speed Rail Consortium, AECOM, Barclays Bank PLC, Ericsson Inc. and Siemens Industry, Inc.
The California High-Speed Rail Authority issued "Request for Expressions of Interest for the Delivery of an Initial Operating Segment (IOS)" on June 22 and set the deadline of submission by Monday.
The IOS-South stretches from Merced to the San Fernando Valley while the IOS-North extends from San Jose and Merced to Bakersfield.
The initial operations of about 410 miles (656 km) between San Jose near the Silicon Valley and Burbank near Los Angeles are planned to begin in 2022. If the CHSR program goes on well, by 2029, the system will run from San Francisco to the Los Angeles basin in under three hours at speeds capable of exceeding 200 miles (some 312 km) per hour.
They system will eventually extend to Sacramento and San Diego, totaling 800 miles (1280 km) with up to 24 stations. The estimated cost of the phase I of the project linking San Francisco to Los Angeles is 68 billion dollars. Jeff Morales, chief executive officer of the Authority, told Xinhua in a recent interview that the Authority was trying to lower the cost and looking forward to suggestion by participants on improving the efficiency.
The California government started to pursue the idea of a Southern California high-speed rail corridor in 1981. In 2002, following the release of the Authority's first business plan in 2000, the Senate passed a bill to authorize a 9.95-billion-dollar bond measure to finance the system.
In November 2008, the bond measure was approved by the state's voters, making it the nation's first ever voter-approved financing mechanism for high-speed rail. In 2009, 8 billion dollars in federal funds was made available nationwide as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and California sought and successfully secured 3.3 billion of the funds.
Besides, a long-term, continuous funding will come from the California Cap-and-Trade program, as the amount for fiscal year 2014-2016 will be 650 million dollars. Attracting long-term private investment is among their goals to provide funding for the project, Morales said.
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