California’s high-speed rail program is finally laying track. The California High-Speed Rail Authority board approved the launch of track and systems installation and awarded the work to a consortium of Kiewit, Stacy and Witbeck, and Herzog, a team that has built most of the freight and transit rail in the western U.S. over the past two decades.
The contract, valued at roughly $3.5 billion, covers the 119 miles of guideway already under construction between Merced and Bakersfield. Until now the program’s spending has gone almost entirely into civil work: viaducts, grade separations, and the dozens of structures that carry the alignment over farm roads and canals. Track, signaling, and traction power are a different phase, and awarding them signals the Central Valley segment is close to a running railroad rather than a construction corridor.
What the track-and-systems contract covers
The Kiewit-led team will install ballasted and slab track, overhead catenary, signaling, and the traction power system that feeds the trainsets. That scope has to be sequenced against civil packages that aren’t all finished, so the consortium’s early job is coordination as much as construction. Herzog and Stacy and Witbeck bring transit-track experience from projects like Austin’s Project Connect light rail; Kiewit brings the heavy-civil muscle for the systems backbone.
A second procurement pushes the line north
The award arrives the same week the Authority advanced a separate, roughly $2.4 billion collaborative design-build procurement for the 30.3-mile Merced-to-Madera extension. That solicitation goes out this summer, with qualified teams shortlisted by December and major construction anticipated from late 2027 through 2030. Read together, the two moves show the Authority trying to keep civil work and systems work moving in parallel instead of one waiting on the other.
Funding questions haven’t gone away, and the full San Francisco-to-Los Angeles vision is still decades and tens of billions of dollars off. But a track contract changes the conversation. Steel on the ground is harder to argue with than a viaduct in a field.