Building Brightline West: Geotechnical Site Investigations

Welcome to Building Brightline West, the geotechnical site investigations edition. Throughout 2024, Brightline West has had engineering crews working along our future route from Las Vegas, NV to Rancho Cucamonga, CA investigating the geology of the soils that will support our tracks and facilities. The data collected from these investigations help finalize the project’s designs as we ramp up to full scale construction. Here we take a look at some of these activities occurring at the site of our future Vehicle Maintenance Facility in Sloan, NV.

0:00 - Overview
0:47 - Geotechnical Boring
10:46 - Resistivity Testing

[ugochukwueze]

Good luck to you guys!!!

We are solidly behind you guys!!!

[gnnascarfan]

Shoutout to you guys letting Roaming Railfan do his thing and document this! Definitely a great insight into the first steps of a major project like this.

[redstripe]

Roaming Railfan! Glad to see you're officially representing Brightline West for construction updates. This is going to be awesome

[sgdjvjp]

Exciting progress! I can’t wait to ride this when it opens!

[eyezak_m]

This is such a great idea! Can't wait to see more of these videos!

[CasualScrub]

I'm so excited man I wanna ride this thing day 1

[bennyg]

Im glad you guys are making video updates, cant wait to see it being built!

[TolEressea]

Nice coverage! Interesting to see how the exploratory drilling takes place. How closely spaced are the drilled holes? And I am wondering just how deep one needs to investigate for the construction of a new railroad? Regarding soil resistivity, the wetness of the soil/sand must make a measurable difference, with wetter soil being more conductive. This video was created during the "wet season"; how does one decide a depth that will work all year around?

Keep up the good work! Go Brightline!

[lostinspace]

California blocks all major projects. Environmentalists stop everything in court for years. IF this ever gets built it would take decades longer than you plan and will cost many times more than you project. The state of California is also going broke and will never put any money towards this project. One of the most expensive places to build a new trainline is in between an existing freeway. There will need to be dozens of new bridges and overpasses built through a state with the highest seismic design requirements. It takes literally years for Caltrans to build and construct a single new overpass for a freeway. I don't think there enough design professionals capable of designing this and there are many large bureaucracies who you need to coordinate with. I don't believe this thing will be built in under 30 years.

Let's pretend you really build it. Now you need to build a bunch of infrastructure to get people from the stations to their destination. You also need to do that for less than the cost of airfare from destination to destination. One hotel in Las Vegas costs over a billion dollars and you want us to believe you can build a 218 mile trainline for under $8 billion? Yea right.