Investors may not be willing to back the state’s bullet train project until after it begins operating, the California High-Speed Rail Authority said in a letter to key legislators, an acknowledgment that again raises serious questions about how the $43-billion construction cost will be paid over the next decade.

The letter gives a preview of the authority’s upcoming business plan, a critical document that is supposed to address long-standing concerns that it lacks a credible blueprint for building and operating the system. Even supporters of the Southern California-to-San Francisco system have said the previous business plans were unrealistic in their estimates of construction costs and ridership numbers, among other things.

The business plan is expected to be filed Nov. 1; it and a related funding plan must be approved by the Legislature before the state can issue any of the $9 billion voters approved for the project in a 2008 bond measure. The Legislature has a 60-day window to approve the plans and then begin committing the state to bonds that would take several decades to pay off.

The authority wants to begin building an initial segment of the system from south of Chowchilla to north of Bakersfield, taking the trains through the Central Valley agriculture belt. That segment would cost about $6 billion, exactly what the authority would have in hand from past federal grants and matching bond funds.

Under the terms of federal grants that are providing about $3 billion in funding, the money has to be spent by 2017, putting the state on a tight schedule to approve the plan, obtain permits and build the initial segment.

Originally, the authority hoped to build the system based on three sources of funding: federal, state and private money. The letter by the authority, sent Friday, said for the first time that private investors are unlikely to put up cash before the system is operating.

Although

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