LAS VEGAS — It has been hailed as the future of mass transit and ridiculed as a big gamble on little more than an amusement-park ride. Which is a pretty clever insult, considering the project in question is a magnetically levitating train that would speed tourists from Las Vegas to Disneyland.
Whether the idea ever gets off the drawing board depends on Congress and the fate of a rival train project that appears to be picking up steam.
The dueling plans are competing for a big piece of the tourism industry: Ten million Southern Californians make the 250-plus-mile drive to Las Vegas each year. The vast majority take an increasingly clogged Interstate 15 that can slow to a crawl and make the drive an ordeal of five hours or more.
For nearly two decades, the main plan was the futuristic maglev train that would zip riders between Sin City and the Magic Kingdom in well under two hours, hurtling across the wide-open desert at up to 300 mph.
But a delay in federal funds needed for planning the public-private venture has suddenly given traction to a cheaper diesel-electric alternative dubbed DesertXpress.
The privately funded DesertXpress would whisk riders to Las Vegas at 125 mph from the Mojave Desert town of Victorville, Calif., some 1 1/2 hours northeast of Los Angeles.
