Looking at the Wikipedia page for the S700, you can find these trains all over the US, including California, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Minnesota, Oregon, Texas, and Virginia. They seem to be popular in Europe, too. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens_S700_and_S70
From what I can tell, these train sets are as off-the-shelf as can be reasonably expected, although apparently LINK has ordered their trains to run on 1500 volts as that’s what their catenaries use. Perhaps you’re thinking of BART?
-An occasional S700 passenger
Before it was built is when they said they would be custom cars.
To be honest though, I didn't find that report very compelling and they didn't back it up with actual load calculations. You really don't hear standard trains being blown over and the Bay Area isn't exactly famous for "high winds" anyway
Yah it's BART that uses an odd track gauge
withstand wind shear
BART never operated on the Golden Gate Bridge (or any of the other Bay Area bridges).
What economies of scale are even possible here? California in particular is relatively isolated from the rest of the country because the thing directly to the east of it is a major desert, followed by a sparsely populated mountain range and then a very large amount of farmland.
The nearest city to California with more than a million people is Phoenix, AZ which is "only" a couple hours from the California border. The next nearest is San Antonio, TX. The distance between Phoenix and San Antonio is about a thousand miles. Neither of those cities themselves have a functional mass transit system for anyone to use even if you put a rail stop there.
California itself constitutes more than half the population of the entire western US, which is otherwise enormous with a very low population density. It doesn't make sense to put high speed rail anywhere in the western US outside of California because there aren't enough people there to use it.
https://www.dot.nv.gov/projects-programs/transportation-proj...
It's cheaper to make more of stuff, even if it's not in the same place
It was almost impossible to find a map where the proposed HSR routes are overlaid with the current Interstate routes. I wonder why. Anyways, in all it's glory I give you this [0]. A route designed to waste money and serve the fewest people.
If it was twice as fast and half the hassle of just driving from Sacramento to Los Angeles on I-5 I would genuinely consider using this service. Which is a really low bar. 120mph average speed with comfortable seating and I'm yours. They just can't manage to incorporate this, which I feel, is refelective of the majority of people in CA who actually need this trail to exist.
Because the biggest threat to any rail project in Cali is political protest and "environmental" lawsuits ("this construction will destroy my view of the landscape!") and the second biggest threat is being forced to buy land from a bunch of people who've had years to collude in only offering ludicrously high prices.
Any sensible project will do its level best to avoid any developed rural land; it's the only way to avoid the massive delays and cost overruns you're complaining about. And besides, once it's built, the land around it will be developed because of the HSR line itself.
With Congress Gridlocked over issues that really should he bipartisan, it'd unironically take less time for the States to figure it out instead.
California, and every other of the dozen plus states where this rolled out should've barely even had any say in the matter. Maybe deciding what artwork to put up in the stations and what to name them. At the same time, it should've been completely federally funded.