The internet is filled with things. Here are some of them.
All of those issues and more set set in motion a domino-like series of circumstances that continue to plague the project, which is now not expected to begin carrying passengers between Merced and Bakersfield until sometime between 2030 and 2033. No time frame has been offered for building or operating future extensions to San Jose or Los Angeles.I would not be the first to see this and wonder, is our country no longer capable of building great big things? Not to say there's no innovation happening in America, that we're not progressing in capability, but those advances now seem to come solely from small, private teams working in isolation and not the big society-driven we're-all-in-this-together initiatives that created the groundwork for the American century.
Still, the rail authority said it is poised for the future. “The majority of the approximately 500-mile system from San Francisco to Los Angeles is fully environmentally cleared and stand shovel-ready for future phases of investment,” the agency’s statement said.
[Governor] Newsom said that officials were "finally at the point where we can start laying track over the next couple of years," after work clearing the way between San Fransisco and Los Angeles was completed. ... Services are expected to start between 2030 and 2033.Of course, this is a touch hyperbolic. Getting the rail corridor is the difficult, slow, costly part of the project. Actually laying the rail comes last. Quoth this reddit:
To start: when you're building a train line, putting down the tracks is one of the last things you do. Just like how you can't lay down tracks for a subway until all the tunnels are dug, you also can't lay down tracks for a bullet train until you've built out all the bridges, viaducts, etc. Once that's done, actually laying the tracks is fairly simple by comparison.
All uninsulated lines show corona. [Corona discharge] just [is] not a big deal until you're dealing with a pretty high voltage. As the voltage goes from a very big positive to a very big negative, the air around it gets ionized... This is the normal mains hum... Water is much, much heavier than air, and it ionizes just as easily. So on a rainy or humid day, the corona is pulsing with water in it. This gives it momentum, so the heavier water particles travel out farther. But they themselves are ionized, which means they can ionize more air than the line could normally reach on its own, and ionized air is conductive. And there's almost always 3 of these lines pretty close together. The sound you're hearing is a million teeny tiny electrostatic discharges from all the charged up water particles interacting with each other with nearby lines or grounded objects. This is actually the worst time to be anywhere near them; the air is supposed to be their insulator, and at that moment it isn't working as well.
Why do American radio stations west of the Mississippi River start with K whereas those to the east start with W? This Big Think / Strange Maps article doesn't answer that question, exactly. It comes close, but it never quite addresses why we need two different prefix letters depending on which side of the country you're on. Because one prefix wouldn't have been enough? So someone crash landing on our planet can quickly determine which side of the Mississippi they've landed on? Because America got assigned those prefixes in the international negotiations and by golly we're going to use them? No answer is forthcoming.
But I link this article anyway because it does at least provide some interesting trivia around the entire topic. Namely, why the letters K and W in particular? We learn that the Radio Regulations of the International Telecommunications Union assign the US four prefixes: K-, W-, A-, and half of N-. I also learned that "radio call signs are reversed out on the ocean. Ship radios on America’s Pacific coast start with W, and with K on the Atlantic side."
So what about all those terrestrial radio stations that start with W- or K- but aren't on the appropriate side of the Mississippi river? The article enumerates the exceptions and provides the reasons for each, except for the three nobody can explain. The majority stem from the K/W divide prior to 1923 being placed further west. Some others come from radio stations which were once "portable" or otherwise moved or were granted exceptions. And one in particular (KTGG) was because someone in government "mistook Michigan for Missouri" – amazing.
And then there's the fact that while the Mississippi River forms the border for most of the states it passes alongside, it bisects Louisiana and has its headwaters inside Minnesota, meaning those states' radio call signs are all over the place, apparently.
So, basically, it's all arbitrary.