14 years after voters approved a nearly $10 billion bond to start building the rail system that would whisk riders from Los Angeles to San Francisco at speeds of more than 200 miles per hour, many California residents have long since lost track of what is being built where, and when or if it will ever be completed.

“We’re teetering on the edge,” said Ashley Swearengin, a former mayor of Fresno who now leads the Central Valley Community Foundation. “We could get it right.” — The New York Times

The cost to build California’s ambitious but long delayed high-speed rail line has once again risen, with rail officials now estimating it could take up to $105 billion to finish the line from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

The project’s price tag has steadily risen since voters first approved nearly $10 billion in bond money for it in 2008, when the total cost was pegged at $40 billion. — KOVR Sacramento

Conway confirmed what several mathematicians have noticed since the station’s unveiling: the pattern on the façade follows the logic not of Conway’s Life but of Wolfram’s Rule 30, a different cellular automaton identified by the computer scientist Stephen Wolfram. — Quartz Media

Deutsche Bahn, a German-based railway and logistics company that transports about seven million train passengers every day ... plans to operate fleets of autonomous vehicles that could be ordered via an app, much people already do when they order a ride-hailing service like Uber. These driverless cars would be used to pick people up and bring them to public transit stations, solving the so-called “last mile” problem. — fortune.com

The Trans-Eurasian Belt Development would see the construction of a vast motorway across Russia. It would connect with existing networks in Europe, making road trips to eastern Russia a far easier proposition. While roads do currently run across most of Russia, the quality tends to deteriorate the farther you travel from Moscow. [...]

A new high-speed train line would also be constructed, along with pipelines for gas and oil. — Business Insider

California's bullet-train agency will officially start construction in Fresno this week on the first 29-mile segment of the system, a symbol of the significant progress the $68-billion project has made against persistent political and legal opposition. [...]

But the milestone marked by Tuesday's groundbreaking ceremony also will serve as a reminder of the enormous financial, technical and political risks still faced by the Los Angeles-to-San Francisco project. — latimes.com

A new engineering report assessing the damage caused to the Amtrak-owned Hudson River and East River tunnels in New York City by Superstorm Sandy in October 2012 recommends a phased process of maintenance works, which will require taking individual tunnel tubes out of service for extended periods. — railjournal.com

Urban densities are not trivial, they severely limit the transport mode choice and change only very slowly. Because of the large differences in densities between Atlanta and Barcelona about the same length of metro line is accessible to 60% of the population in Barcelona but only 4% in Atlanta. The low density of Atlanta render this city improper for rail transit. — usa.streetsblog.org

It was 75 years ago—the year Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz were released and World War II began—that Los Angeles's lovely Union Station first opened for business. There was a big Downtown celebration on May 3, 1939 to mark the opening of what is viewed as the nation's last great rail station, and Ward Kimball, an award-winning Disney animator and part-time rail nerd (one of Disney's Nine Old Men and the man who created Tweedledee/Tweedledum and Jiminy Cricket), filmed the occasion. — la.curbed.com

Major construction is currently under way in Reading, England as part of the Reading Station Area Redevelopment. In this new construction update video, Mark Middleton, partner at Grimshaw Architects, is on site at Reading Station and explains how the redevelopment will double its capacity and relieve a major bottleneck in the rail network west of London. — bustler.net

California has grabbed a golden opportunity to build the nation’s first high-speed rail system, create the backbone of a new, clean 21st century transportation system and support our future economic growth. — Washington Post

“This project presents a novel approach to U.S. locomotive development, looking to technologies of the past to inspire solutions for today’s sustainability challenges."
- Sustainable Rail International President Davidson Ward, 2010 School of Architecture graduate from the College of Design at the University of Minnesota — UMNews

We recently published one of the two winning entries to the Kaohsiung Port Station Urban Design competition by De Architekten Cie. Here is now also the second of two entries that managed to win the jury's highest praise, the Excellence Award, by AGER Group’s Boston Studio. — bustler.net

Amsterdam-based practice De Architekten Cie. has won the open international Kaohsiung Port Station Urban Design competition in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. The competition was initiated by the city government of Kaohsiung to transform the derelict site of the old railyards and port station from a barrier between two important areas of the city into a connective piece of the urban fabric. — bustler.net