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Old 09-18-2019, 01:25 AM   #75
bhlloy
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Join Date: Nov 2003
Sorry, there's no way train travel ever works in the US at a large scale. For a start, just due to the distances you need insanely high speed trains. Look at the places where high speed trains work, you have incredibly high levels of funding from local and state governments, and that's never going to fly in the US. The UK has got itself into a terrible mess over electrified high speed trains and have spent the last 5 years basically making the scope smaller and smaller and smaller due to delays and cost overruns, and that's a country that prioritizes public transport and is the size of Colorado or Nevada.

And let's say you spend those hundreds of billions of dollars to put high speed trains between every major city in the US, and the absolute army of maintenance workers and technicians to keep it up and running through thousands of miles of nothingness, you've basically still just created what is essentially a much slower but possibly a bit cheaper plane network and nobody is going to use it.

I do think some expansion of regional rail does make sense (I was genuinely disappointed to see the SF - LA high speed link bite the dust, even if it was going to be a corrupt expensive clusterfuck even by California standards) and it has never made sense to me that one of the Casinos doesn't built a high speed link connecting Vegas and LA (well, I do know why not and that's because California won't let those tax dollars leave the state even easier) but on a national interstate level? Just never going to happen.
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