[excerpt]....My train riding includes Amtrak, and Amtrak is a fun way to travel, as long as you don’t care when you leave or when you arrive. Since most travelers do care about those things, Amtrak does not have a large customer base and roars deeper into the red every year. It has escaped the ax time after time because of too many jobs involved, or too many riders dependent on the service (like, maybe, 12), or even perhaps a touch of nostalgia for the great age of rail travel. Nostalgia, I suspect, had something to do with the creation of Amtrak in the first place. No one yearns for the great age of covered wagon travel, but I guess there’s a limit.
High-speed rail would be Amtrak on steroids. Almost literally, for most plans call for upgrading parts of the existing system to run faster and more often. Vice President Joe Biden has been a cheerleader for years, and the president has apparently caught the bug: “Imagine, he said in a 2009 speech announcing his plan, “boarding a train in the center of a city. No racing to an airport and across a terminal, no delays, no sitting on the tarmac, no lost luggage, no taking off your shoes.” And imagine there’s no countries, or nothing to kill or die for, or—no wait, wrong pipe dream. The State of the Union speech devoted a paragraph to giving “80 percent of Americans access to high-speed rail . . . for some trips, it will be faster than flying—without the pat-down.” Good one, Mr. President. Though what makes anyone imagine that mass rail transit would escape the grope of the TSA?....
........A network of high-speed rail like Obama proposes (with lines fanning out from Chicago, up from Texas, and down both coastlines) ignores the most basic element of railroading: the track. Most track in the United States is rated for speeds no higher than 70 mph (or 80 max). To support speeds of 110 or more, it would have to be upgraded, at huge expense and inconvenience for the trains already running on it. Once upgraded, passenger trains would be given right-of-way over freight, as Amtrak trains already are, disrupting further the most economical and environmentally friendly transit system in the world and forcing common carriers to bear expenses that they would pass on to shippers. That would inevitably translate into higher utility and product costs for us. And if current Amtrak ridership is any indication, those extra passenger trains—whizzing by in a blur while valuable commodities simmer on a siding—would be mostly empty...[end excerpt]