The project that was once a campaign banner and a symbol of modernity now depends exclusively on the private sector — with no public money, no environmental license, and no available Brazilian engineering.

When technical expertise organizes space, society gains time to live. Brazil, however, continues to demonstrate that it prefers to postpone this meeting between planning and reality, especially when the subject is high-speed rail.

Eighteen years after becoming an official promise of the Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva government, the high-speed train between São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro is racking up a new delay and maintains an embarrassing score: zero track built in almost two decades of speeches. The estimated cost of the work has already reached R$60 billion, and passenger operation, if construction begins in 2028, is only expected for 2032.

TAV Brasil, the company that received authorization from the National Land Transport Agency (ANTT) to build and operate the railroad for up to 99 years, projects fares between R$300 and R$500 for the 417-kilometer route. The trip would be completed in less than two hours, with a maximum speed of 320 km/h and four stations: São Paulo, São José dos Campos, Volta Redonda, and Rio de Janeiro.

According to a report by Gazeta do Povo, the federal government is now exempting itself from financing, leaving the project entirely in the hands of the private sector. The position represents a turnaround from what was announced in 2023, when the Minister of Transport, Renan Filho, stated that the Union would supplement the necessary resources to make the project viable.

The Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (Ibama) reported that the environmental licensing has not even been completed. The Environmental Impact Study and Environmental Impact Report (EIA/Rima), required by the agency in March of last year, has not yet been submitted by the concessionaire.

The absence of the EIA/Rima is just the tip of the iceberg of technical challenges that the route imposes. The crossing of the Serra do Mar and the urban interferences in two of the country's largest metropolitan areas require a level of railway engineering that Brazil has never practiced at high speed.

Economist and president of Inter.B International Business Consulting, Cláudio Frischtak, recalls that Brazilian experience is limited to freight trains with speeds between 80 km/h and 100 km/h. The technological leap required by a high-speed train, which operates above 300 km/h, is radical in terms of design, equipment, and components.

Frischtak assesses that the project is extremely expensive and very difficult to justify from an economic standpoint, especially without robust public subsidies. He compares it to the Spanish expansion, which relied on significant transfers from the European Union, a scenario that does not exist in a Brazil mired in permanent fiscal crisis.

The executive director of the Brazilian Railway Preservation Association (ABPF), Thomaz Schoeffel, emphasizes that Brazilian engineering has lost capacity for works of this scale. Importing teams and know-how would be inevitable, which would further increase deployment and maintenance costs.

Only four countries dominate high-speed train technology over long distances: China, France, Japan, and Spain. TAV Brasil states that it is structuring a consortium with European and Chinese companies, betting on the international experience of these groups to get the railway off the drawing board.

The current project is the result of an important regulatory change. The Railways Law (Law No. 14,273/2021), sanctioned during the Jair Bolsonaro government, allowed private authorizations for railway construction and operation, dispensing with the traditional concession model and opening space for proposals such as that of TAV Brasil.

The history of the high-speed train, however, holds an alternative that was controversially discarded. The proposal for a medium-speed train, with shared use of the tracks for passengers during the day and freight at night, was rejected during the Dilma Rousseff government, on the grounds that the country needed a definitive technological leap.

The result is that Brazil remains without either option. While countries like China expand their high-speed networks year after year, the Brazilian government is now trying to make other railway projects viable, such as the National Railway Plan, which foresees investments of R$100 billion in approximately 4.7 thousand kilometers of new tracks, according to a CNN Brasil report.

The very possibility of a transcontinental railway connection, such as the one Brazil and China discussed in a memorandum of understanding signed in July 2025, runs into the same difficulty of materializing large-scale works on rails. The plan to link Brazilian territory to the port of Chancay, in Peru, depends on studies that are still in the initial phase.

Meanwhile, the high-speed train between São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro remains an exercise in historical patience. The project has already gone through the PAC, through two state-owned companies created and dissolved, through failed auctions, and through countless presidential statements that never turned into machines on the ground.

The technical chronicle of this failure reveals that Brazil has not yet learned to turn plans into real infrastructure, especially when technologies we do not master are at stake. High-speed railways cannot be improvised — they require decades of technical accumulation, consistent state policies, and a stable financing system.

With no engineering of its own, no environmental license, no public money, and no clear political horizon, the Brazilian high-speed train remains just a line on a map that is never drawn on the ground. The time that society should gain from organized technical expertise continues to be lost in promises that are renewed but never fulfilled.