Las Vegas may get a real railway station again

By C.R. | HAMBURG

SINCE Amtrak closed down its passenger-rail service through Las Vegas in 1997, train spotters looking for its station have had to go to Miniatur Wunderland, a model-railway museum in Hamburg, Germany. There modelling enthuasiasts have built a scale version of the city of casinos, at a scale of 1:87, complete with a fictional railway station in central Las Vegas (see picture).

But soon Miniatur Wunderland will have to revise its model with some Brightline branding. On September 18th the Florida startup announced that it had taken-over a project to build a new passenger-rail line between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Earlier this year, it launched its debut service between Miami and West Palm Beach, the first new passenger-rail line to built by a private company in America for over a century. In this week's issue, we took a look behind the company's motivations:

Wes Edens of Fortress, a private-equity firm, is the founder of Brightline. He thinks that the industry is ripe for a rebound… Brightline plans to focus on those between big cities “too far to drive, too short to fly”, such as between Atlanta and Charlotte, Houston and Dallas, and Chicago and St Louis. Several trends may help fill the trains. The number of youngsters who drive is falling: only 69% of 19-year-old Americans have licences, compared with 87% in 1983. Wi-Fi means that business people can work on trains.

But does it have enough money to fulfil its grand ambitions?

Other track owners want to give their own freight trains priority and balk at investing the money needed to run passenger trains at faster speeds. Brightline could build new tracks, as it plans to between LA and Las Vegas. But this is likely to cost billions of dollars for each of the 10-15 lines it wants to build. Some analysts say it would need to issue more equity, perhaps in an IPO.

The full article can be found here.