Betting Tax Dollars on a Bullet Train to Vegas

There’s only highway that leads straight from Southern California to Las Vegas, and on any given weekend thousands of gamblers determined to wager can wind up crawling along I-15 for over three hours on their way to The Strip. Tony Marnell,the developer who built the Bellagio, Mirage, and Wynn Las Vegas casinos, has a plan to get gamblers to the blackjack tables in 80 minutes. He wants to build the DesertXpress, a high-speed train that would run 190 miles from Victorville, Calif., a desert community 85 miles northeast of Los Angeles, to Vegas, and cost $75 round-trip. “People don’t want to spend their time traveling to Las Vegas,” says Marnell. “They want to spend time being in Las Vegas.”

Marnell’s business, Marnell Cos., and two partners have already put more than $40 million into the $6.5 billion project, which has been in the works for a decade. Earlier this month, the DesertXpress developers cleared the last of the many federal regulatory hurdles required to break ground on the bullet train, including an extensive environmental review. Now they’re hoping the federal government will do one more thing: front them the rest of the money.