I've long held the opinion that the Central Valley portion of the project, and/or the first phase of this project -- which in this case, refer to the same stretch -- is overbuilt in ways that make little practical sense.
If you're putting stations into every major town, roughly 30 miles apart, it makes little sense to build things like curves with a radius of over 3.5 miles (~ 5.6 km) on a viaduct, comparable to open-line track radii in France for TGV lines, just outside of Fresno's station where you're going to slow down to 0 mph anyway.
This kind of silliness is why they're over budget. The most acute impediments to long-distance rail in California is the lack of dedicated, quality track along which a trainset could speed along between towns without regard to freight, so it would stand to reason to solve that part first, while leaving a bunch of expensive niceties for later, when enough appetite for them has been built up.
When France built the TGV, or Germany their equivalent, they didn't rebuild their downtowns to accommodate high-speed tracks; this is a uniquely American fetishism the same way the US took interstate highways into their downtowns in the 60s.
In order to meet the voter-mandated requirements of the proposition which started the project, some trains must run non-stop from San Jose to Los Angeles at 220 MPH. Many trains will go right through Fresno at very high speeds. That is why the track has the radius it has.
I think the original Prop 1 bill [1] lays out maximum nonstop travel time targets between major cities to be delivered, and a requirement to be able to bypass any station at "mainline operating speed", (which I strongly believe is an engineering detail that has no place in law), but not a requirement to actually have some trains on the books that will proceed through Fresno without a stop.
The spirit of your post stands nonetheless; the Prop 1 bill codified a bunch of ambitious requirements ahead of time, ignorant of local conditions or engineers' opinion.
If you're putting stations into every major town, roughly 30 miles apart, it makes little sense to build things like curves with a radius of over 3.5 miles (~ 5.6 km) on a viaduct, comparable to open-line track radii in France for TGV lines, just outside of Fresno's station where you're going to slow down to 0 mph anyway.
This kind of silliness is why they're over budget. The most acute impediments to long-distance rail in California is the lack of dedicated, quality track along which a trainset could speed along between towns without regard to freight, so it would stand to reason to solve that part first, while leaving a bunch of expensive niceties for later, when enough appetite for them has been built up.
When France built the TGV, or Germany their equivalent, they didn't rebuild their downtowns to accommodate high-speed tracks; this is a uniquely American fetishism the same way the US took interstate highways into their downtowns in the 60s.