While corporate officials with Brightline West are putting the best face possible on the Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection filing done by its parent/sister company across the continent, a host of developments indicate that the sword of Damocles is stretched perilously above the Southern California-to-Las Vegas high-speed rail project.
Brightline West is proposing to build a 218-mile, all-electric, high-speed passenger rail system connecting Las Vegas to Rancho Cucamonga.
Brightline has built and established a 235-mile intercity higher-speed passenger rail network connecting South and Central Florida. Brightline operational rail routes and infrastructure in Florida is impressive. From south Florida to the central Florida corridor, Brightline operates a line running from downtown Miami to Orlando International Airport, covering the full distance in about 3 hours and 25 minutes at top speeds of 125 mph. Brightline’s Phase 1 in South Florida, which launched in 2018, utilizes upgraded tracks along the century-old Florida East Coast Railway corridor connecting Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and West Palm Beach. The company’s Phase 2 East-West Connector, which opened in September 2023, is a dedicated 35-mile, fenced, grade-separated rail corridor alongside the Beachline Expressway, also known as State Route 528, from Cocoa to Orlando International Airport. The established stations in Florida include MiamiCentral Station, the Aventura Station, the Fort Lauderdale Station, the West Palm Beach Station and the Orlando International Airport Station.
Despite the ostensible success of Brightline’s rail operations in Florida, including what might otherwise be considered decent ridership levels, the company this week filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection due to the ridership levels not reaching the levels that had been confidently predicted for them, leaving the company heavily in debt.
Brightline boasts ridership in Florida of roughly 3.5 million passengers, paying anywhere from $80 to $400 per roundtrip ticket each, per year, generating revenue in the area of $240 million annually. The company experienced an annual growth in ridership and revenue averaging 17 percent over the last three years. Nevertheless, for the last two-to-two-and-half years, the company has been trying to find a way to reduce its existing debt by $6 billion, as the growth it is experiencing is being consumed by that debt. That could have been realistically done if the trains had twice their ridership. Indeed, as late as 2024, it had been the company’s hope that the number of travelers on the trains might reach 7 million per year by this year. That has not come about. As a consequence, Brightline had to back up and regroup, thus the bankruptcy.
Just as there was tremendous confidence and exuberance about the Florida Brightline undertaking, there has all along been the same degree of confidence about the success of the future Rancho Cucamonga-to Vegas line, which is to later to become an Anaheim-to-Vegas line and then ultimately a Los Angeles-to-Vegas line.
Having been subsidized with a $3 billion federal grant and allocated another $3.5 billion in federal tax-exempt Private Activity Bonds, Brightline went forward with the Rancho Cucamonga-to-Vegas project groundbreaking in April 2024. A precept was that a good percentage of the 12.5 million visitors from Southern California that made their way to Las Vegas annually would, once the train line as in place and up and running, opt to forego driving and instead use the Brightline high speed system. Traveling between 186 to 200 miles per hour, the train would reach its destination in something around an hour and five minutes to an hour and ten minutes, a vast improvement of the minimum three-and-a-half hour journey by car, in the best of circumstances, to a seven-or-eight hour ordeal when traffic conditions deteriorate.
Yet a set of no fewer than seven factors that were already in play and which have further materialized in the last two years is threatening the viability of Brightline West’s Rancho Cucamonga-to-Vegas venture. One of those is the projected cost of the project jumping to 269 percent of the original price tag when it was first proposed in 2007 and 147 percent of a more realistic estimate that the project’s developers intimated would be its actual cost in 2024. Another is the escalating cost of fare on the train, which, beyond a certain point, means that ridership will not reach the figures once anticipated and, potentially, drop even further once the novelty of traveling by speedy train wears off.
Another even more alarming factor is the slow deterioration of Las Vegas as an attraction due to escalating costs. Thus, what some prognosticators are predicting is a fate for Brightline West not unsimilar to what Brightline in Florida experienced: a rail system built and financed on the assumption of a certain ridership level that never, in reality, materialized.
Originally projected in 2006 to cost $8 billion, Brightline West’s Rancho Cucamonga to Las Vegas project’s price tag increased to $12 billion when enough interest among investors and involved entities crucial to its success coalesced in 2021 into a commitment to proceed. The original cost had doubled to $16 billion at the time the company broke ground in June 2024. the belief was that the project could yet succeed and the debt be serviced through 2037 – its first decade of operation, upon the project being completed in 2027. The most sober assessment as of late last year was the cost was to increase to $21.5 million, with the train not starting service until 2029.
All of the predictions had been predicated on assumptions of the steadily increasing popularity of gambling mecca. Since the project’s groundbreaking, however, tourism in Las Vegas and corresponding spending there has dipped, significantly.
In 2024, 41,676,300 million tourists spent $55.1 billion in Las Vegas, according to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. That represented a 2.07 percent increase over 2023.
In 2025, however, Las Vegas welcomed 38.5 million visitors, representing a 7.5% decrease compared to 2024. Visitor spending in Las Vegas totaled $50.8 billion in 2025, 92.19 percent of what it was the previous year.
High costs in the city are driving tourists away. Traditionally, the gambling venues in Las Vegas offered very reasonably priced meals and entertainment as a draw to get the adventuresome to try their luck at a roulette wheel, blackjack tables, dice boards, slot machines or other gaming opportunities, where the odds, overall, favor the house by at least 8.943 percent. In recent years, however, the cost of food and entertainment has risen dramatically, to the point that tourists find themselves flocking hundreds of miles to find themselves needing to fork over in excess of $100 for a ticket to see a show in Vegas or pay $26 for a toasted bagel with cream cheese or $22 for a bottle of water. In addition, the price for accommodations and services have escalated, in some cases to astronomical levels, even as the vacancy rates in hotels and hotel casinos climb. This is exacerbated by a bevy of hidden charges that aren’t sprung on the guest until he or she arrives in the form of exorbitant parking fees, resort “excise” fees, and “courtesy” charges for checking-in or basic amenities such as towels. A recurrent complaint from those who have spent time in Las Vegas in recent years is that they experience a feeling of “being had,” and this perception that Las Vegas is overpriced and is no longer a value destination has resulted in many foregoing a return there. The decline in spending has prompted an increase in pricing, which in turn has led to a drop in the tourists’ spending on the city’s most profitable offerings, such as gambling.
That vicious cycle has led to the advancement of the greatest current threat to Las Vegas yet, the proliferation of Indian gaming venues all over California, which divert to their own coffers a larger and larger portion of Southern California residents’ disposable incomes which formerly went to the casinos in Las Vegas.
With the visitor numbers and accompanying spending in Las Vegas precipitously plunging downward, the Fortress Investment Group – the hedge fund supplying the investment capital behind the Brightline West Project – is becoming measurably less willing to gamble that this is just a temporary phenomenon. It is notable that Pete Briger, a managing partner and the executive chairman at Fortress Investment Group, who just two years ago was expressing unbridled confidence in the Brightline West project, has over the last 15 months been muted when asked about the venture.
What is needed is continuing investor confidence. Investors, or at least some investors, already looking at holding off for five or even ten years before seeing any return, are willing to defer profit taking for another year or two years or three years, provided, of course, the profit comes, eventually. But with Brightline’s Florida venture filing for Chapter 11 protection, investors are confronted with the sobering reality that they might not see any return for quite some time or might not see any return at all. And the more recently one has invested, the greater the delay in seeing a return or the greater the chance that there will be no return whatsoever.
In a bankruptcy, senior debt is always paid before junior debt. Senior creditors have priority in repayment, and junior creditors are paid only after all senior claims are fully satisfied.
The timing of the Florida Brightline bankruptcy filing is inopportune for Brightline West, a separate undertaking under the overarching corporate umbrella. Brightline West is continuing its search for funding to continue, even as the high-speed Southern California-to-Vegas train business model is looking less and less viable.
Last month, Sarah Watterson, the Brightline project’s president for the last seven years exited as the company was hitting a particularly rocky patch in the struggle to raise enough capital to complete the project. Company spokesman Antonio Castelan told KTLA that Brightline Florida’s bankruptcy would have no impact on Brightline West’s plans to complete the Rancho Cucamonga-to-Las Vegas line.