Although planners of California's high-speed rail won praise last week for candor about the train's cost, an analysis of their 230-page plan shows they still are making highly speculative assumptions about funding and ridership.

Despite hostility toward the project from Republicans in Congress, the California High-Speed Rail Authority expects to receive $55 billion in federal grants -- including $13 billion in the next 10 years.

The planners also are counting on Congress to approve a new form of infrastructure bonds -- and to get 27%, or $13 billion, of all those bonds issued nationwide.

And they expect to draw $11 billion in private capital, based on ridership estimates that suggest Merced will draw more passengers than Penn Station in New York City.

The business plan portrays a project that will be rolling in money -- eventually billions of dollars in profits annually -- but only after it begins carrying passengers in 2022.

Until then, it will depend on billions of dollars every year from congressional leaders, some of whom have labeled it a boondoggle.

The rail authority is proposing to build the project in phases -- the same way, the business plan notes, that California built the mammoth State Water Project and Interstate 5 through the Central Valley during the 1960s and '70s.

There is, however, a key difference between those projects and high-speed rail: Those earlier projects had dedicated streams of money that kept engineers and construction crews busy, year after year, decade after decade.

The state will spend all of its current federal grant money on the first 130 miles of track from Bakersfield to Fresno.

Despite the mocking nickname critics have given that link -- including "the train to nowhere" -- it will have no train. There is no money in the budget for a high-speed train on that segment.

The backup plan is to let Amtrak run its heavy, 79-mph engines on the new tracks. That will shave 45 minutes off the 21/2-hour run between Bakersfield and Fresno.

A million passengers a year take that ride.

Reliant on federal funds

If there is ever to be a high-speed train in California, it will arrive with the second phase, after the authority extends the tracks some 100 miles to the north or south of that first segment, to either San Jose or to the San Fernando Valley.

Total price tag for the second phase: $19.4 billion to $25.8 billion.

The authority will spend all its remaining state bond money -- $5 billion -- on that second phase.

It hopes to somehow raise $7 billion to $8.5 billion in federal grants from 2015 to 2021.

As for the remaining $12 billion to $13 billion -- on the high end -- needed for the second phase, the authority is banking on something that Congress has not even authorized: "qualified tax credit bonds."

Legislation proposed this year by Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, and John Hoeven, R-N.D., would create a 10-year, $50 billion pool of these bonds for sale to private investors to pay for transportation improvements.

The rail authority needs 26% of the national total to help put high-speed rail in operation.

Once trains start running -- 2022 in the authority's plan -- everything changes.

The authority predicts it will clear a $200 million profit that first year, even if ridership is low. By 2035, profits could surpass $2 billion; by 2060, $7 billion.

With that kind of money rolling in, the authority expects to attract nearly $11 billion in private investment to help build later phases soon after the trains begin running.