You wrote "Then more money should be put in railways!"
Under President Eisenhower we launched a number of large infrastructure projects, the Interstate Highway System and St. Lawrence Seaway being two good examples. The government spends a larger share of GDP today but I see very little accomplished with the money. I think that your idea is very sound and a far better use of taxpayer dollars than, for example sending two billion dollars a year to Egypt.
A few weeks after I joined Free Republic there was a thread out upgrading a railway line that parallels Interstate 81 between Knoxville, Tennessee and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Poster "Publius" posted a good reply about something about "The Steel Interstate" on the thread:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1278708/replies?c=24
The route was about 600 miles and the upgrade would cost about 2.3 billion dollars, as a comparison we spent 2.8 billion dollars building a sewage system for Cairo. The major cost would have been double tracking, plus some track realignments to raise the speed in some areas. I don't think it would have involved electrification of the line though, I do not know what that costs since we have not done it on a large scale.
I had suggested in an earlier post that we could have trans that would ferry vehicles across the country, I found a site that has a picture of something similar, I think in the Alps:
http://journalism.wlu.edu/rrarchive/11-18-2004/i-81.htm
There was also a thread about fuel costs hitting truckers in the wallet posted yesterday:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1465999/posts Several people who posted on the thread had personal experience with this, at least one had a husband who drives truck. It will also show up in the price of everything that arrives by truck, so it could hit everyones wallet.
I think projects like the I-81 railway upgrade could help with this, and if we stopped sending money to Egypt and spent it on this instead we could end up sending less money to Saudi Arabia too.
As for Amtrak i don't see them as a very competent. In the early nineties the brought over a high speed train from Sweden, and another one from Germany, they were looking for "off the shelf" technology. The Swedish model even tilted so it could run at higher speeds on curves. After evaluating both models, Amtrak selected a French design that was not even tested here! it apparently is successful over in France. And to boot, they had it redesigned to tilt, in France it runs on dedicated lines. And that train has had many problems ever since.
I've never ridden on an Amtrak train but I have ridden on a number in the Osaka region of Japan, every one was electric by the way. We do not have the same population density to make a similar network pay, the ones in Osaka are all private and make a profit. Some were run by the government before and lost staggering amounts of money.
If it will be a given that the government will spend about 20% of the GDP, it should at least spend a tenth of that on infrastructure. Highways can use it to, some parts of the Interstate Highways can stand improvement, for example some tunnels like the Eisenhower Tunnel on I-70, and better bridges, like a high level bridge on I-90 at Vantage, Washington instead of the present bridge with a 90 degree bend on the eastern side of the Columbia River. Remember the I-40 bridge across the Arkansas River that was knocked down by a barge a few years ago?
Much of the old US Highway system could be upgraded too, more overpasses and bypasses so you can drive long distance without stopping and slowing down so often.