Someday, it will be possible to board a train in downtown San Francisco and arrive less than three hours later in downtown Los Angeles.
Until that day comes, you can track the progress of construction on the California High-Speed Rail Authority's new interactive construction update page. There you can view up-to-date photos of the program's sixteen current construction sites.
While the locations of the construction sites may look a bit scattershot, they're not. The strategy with a high-speed rail project is to first bridge rivers, move roads, take out obstacles, and build an accessible path where the tracks are going to go. That way trucks and grading and track-laying machines use those bridges and viaducts in the next phase of construction.
Once the ROW is open, bridged, and unobstructed, they'll bring in automated track-laying machines like this:
The first high-speed trains should be running from the Central Valley cities to the Bay Area by 2025, with the connection to Los Angeles coming online a few years after that. Meanwhile, work has started on the 'bookends' north of Los Angeles and south of San Francisco.
