Holocaust Reparations by French Railway System

[merrylander]

Originally Posted by donquixote99

OK, figuring a 60' wide corridor, that's something like 7.3 acres/mile, which at $250 M/mile, makes about $34 M/acre.

That's high, because there's other costs, but it would be high at half the price....

At those prices if they want to put high speed rail through here I'll sell. Otherwise it goes for about $9000 - $10000 per acre around here.

[donquixote99]

Finnbows info reduces the size of the land buy, but adds a tunnel. Some project, in any case....

[finnbow]

Originally Posted by merrylander

At those prices if they want to put high speed rail through here I'll sell. Otherwise it goes for about $9000 - $10000 per acre around here.

Really? A nice size (1 acre) buildable lot around here can cost upwards of $250K. We have three 5 acre lots for sale down the street that are listed for $700K apiece (and they'll need well and septic systems).

[bobabode]

How did they manage it in Japan? Isn't land there far more expensive? Just trying to understand.

[finnbow]

Originally Posted by bobabode

How did they manage it in Japan? Isn't land there far more expensive? Just trying to understand.

I know that in Germany that they had the right-of-way reserved for many years before they got started. Once you have constructed a lot of improvements upon the land, problems (and expense) go up considerably.

[bobabode]

I guess I'm befuddled in regards to building it out here. There is a huge ROW right up the center of most of the Golden State freeway (5) between LA and San Francisco.
I guess it's like universal healthcare, we're too damn pigheaded and stupid to follow the lead of the rest of the industrialized world and do the right thing.

[merrylander]

Originally Posted by finnbow

Really? A nice size (1 acre) buildable lot around here can cost upwards of $250K. We have three 5 acre lots for sale down the street that are listed for $700K apiece (and they'll need well and septic systems).

I think I may have left a zero off, probably should be 90,00 and 100,000.

Whe we bought the roughly 4.5 acres cost $45,000 three years later 3 acre lots were going for $135,000 or $45,000 per acre. Now you just can't get big lots all the big houses are in one of those Cluster Phuk deals were each house does not even get an acre and they are all on a common septic system. Man can that ever be fun. One around the corner had no one in charge. All the city folks threw anything and everything down the john so the system backed up.

[donquixote99]

Originally Posted by merrylander

At those prices if they want to put high speed rail through here I'll sell. Otherwise it goes for about $9000 - $10000 per acre around here.

Basic transcription error in my math first time. The right calculation would have been about $3.8 M/acre. But that is inclusive of all project costs, and also spreads it over a lot more acres than were actually bought, so it's not such a good number.

Still, I'd love to have enough info on the project to actually understand the cost. Which was tremendous, no doubt

[finnbow]

Apparently, this shakedown effort may doom the entire project:

"A $900 million federal grant to build a light-rail Purple Line would be jeopardized if Maryland lawmakers require an affiliate of one of the project’s bidders to compensate Holocaust victims it transported to Nazi death camps, according to a top attorney for the Federal Transit Administration.

The legislation, which targets the government-owned French rail company SNCF, presents “legal concerns,” according to a letter, dated Thursday, from FTA Deputy Chief Counsel Dana Nifosi to the Maryland Transit Administration. Federal procurement rules require “full and open competition,” Nifosi wrote, and would not allow federal money for a contract solicited with “exclusionary or discriminatory” specifications."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/...4bf_story.html