“I’ll believe when I see it” has always been a good policy to follow when dealing with the X Train. This, you may recall, was the rail service that was to be underwritten with onboard gambling and was to double as a freight service to bring Rick Moonen‘s seafood to Las Vegas. However, a recent SEC filing throws the X Train into even more doubt than ever before. Heck, we should have known better when the X Train unveiled a rendering of a station to be built by the Plaza. Counting on Tamares Group to come through with anything capital-intensive is almost always a losing bet.
Parent Las Vegas Railway Express has abandoned its strategy of having priority on Union Pacific lines and forfeited its $600,000 deposit. Now it’s trying to reinstate Amtrak service to Las Vegas and to couple its ‘party cars’ to Amtrak trains. It’s also getting perilously close to the maximum float of its penny stock, having issued almost 165,000,000 shares. The Las Vegas Review-Journal‘s Tim O’Reiley has a high time poking hole after hole in the X Train’s new strategy.
Contacted by the Las Vegas Sun, CEO Michael Barron insisted all was well. He had already told the SEC (and shareholders) “we no longer needed to retain the Union Pacific agreement, which required the company to make prepaid capital improvement payments of $66 million,” even though that runs a cart and horses through the X Train’s business plan. The same might be said of Barron’s planned, North Las Vegas disembarkation point. If you’re bringing passengers to Craig Road and I-15 (where the nearest major casino is The Cannery), you might as well land them on the dark side of the moon. Barron, who has missed at least one deadline for his choo-choo, now is aiming for a May 2015 rollout.
