
The reality of train travel.
The idea a minute crowd in the Obama administration has seized on to the idea of high speed rail as a transportation solution. I assume this has the backing of Joe Biden, who has been using Amtrak for twenty years and has never spent five cents of his own money doing so.
He also has a driver meet him at the station in Washington, gets to the office when he feels like it, and Union Station is within blocks of the Senate. Driving into and out of DC is a nightmare and taking the train from Philadelphia or Wilmington makes sense. Unfortunately that is the exception and not the rule.
In order to have high speed rail in America, a lot has to change. The first thing is new track has to be put down. It is unsafe, unwise and impractical to have passenger and freight sharing the same track. Passenger service to be effective requires speed and convenience of schedule. Freight requires inexpensive transport and many transfer points.
A successful inter city system between New York and Washington make sense if you are going from Georgetown to Manhattan, but what if your final stop is in Queens, Brooklyn or the Bronx. That requires transfers to some fairly unpleasant stations and subway trains, where there is neither glamour nor romance and often inconvenience of schedules.

Wishing they were in an SUV?
What if it rains or snows or you miss a connection?
It is next to impossible to go from station to station and still be convenient to and from your home to your destination which may be blocks or miles away from the high speed station. No high speed line will offer the convenience, privacy, comfort and safety of your own automobile. No train will match the speed of an airplane.
The only way high speed train service makes sense is to open new satellite cities for development, and that is centralized planning on a massive scale and has nothing to do with time or fuel efficiency. Just the opposite may be true. You very well may end up with more development, more destruction of the natural environment and ironically more automobile traffic in areas where today there is little.
This idea is best forgotten.
