Ed Greding Loc: Texas

Oops---'Sorry for the double post.

Cykdelic Loc: Now outside of Chiraq & Santa Fe, NM

......and how to maybe pay for itself?

cabunit Loc: SE Connecticut

Not true, exactly. Amtrak owns the whole NEC from Boston to Washington, with the exception of a stretch between New Haven and New Rochelle. The problem on most of the route is curvature. The New Haven to New Rochelle segment does not yet have constant-tension catenary (overhead wires), which are necessary for high speed operation.

cabunit Loc: SE Connecticut

We hear this over and over. Did private industry, for example, build the interstates? No, they were originally built, at least in part, to support national defense. Do they make money? Are they, therefore, a "poor idea?"

rehess Loc: South Bend, Indiana, USA

It appears to me that there are other issues with the NE Corridor also. IIRC, for example, there is a grade-level road crossing at the Mystic station - good high speed operation would have all traffic crossings be bridges/underpasses. Also, there was a time when I was at an Amtrak station in Connecticut when a voice said "Get away from the track"; a minute later the Acela came through on tracks adjacent to the platform - good high speed operation would have trains next to platforms only for station stops, but most of the NE Corridor tracks don't seem to have a track away from all platforms.

wideangle Loc: Wisconsin

Much or our problem is existing tracks. It costs too much to build tracks that can take 200 mph and get around this country where anyone wants or needs to go. You can run on the Bonneville Salt flats, but that's not a destination. Liberal love trains and spending money on them if only to "say" they are needed and can do speeds that would get people around quickly. They have no concept of what it takes to run a high speed train in this country. We, in Wisconsin, had a liberal governor a few years back that spent millions getting a Spanish company to move to Milwaukee to build high speed rail train cars. One of the problems of spending all that money was, we had a company already in Milwaukee that made train cars. The train was to run on existing tracks that were 5 miles or more from any ending near a town or shopping center. The existing tracks would not be able to handle 200 mph. The figures for top speed was 60 mph. It took conservative talk show people to keep harping on the problems of this system. Liberals cried foul, came up with to many unrealistic concepts, and finally got the state government to shut down the program. Millions of dollars wasted, jobs in Milwaukee lost, and nothing to show for it. Now the mayor of Milwaukee wants to run a trolley downtown...an ELECTRIC trolley, yes, with wires running above the tracks connecting the trolley to these wires for power. He took 60 million dollars from the Obama administration for this. It is expected to run 3 times the cost, sticking the city taxpayers with the bill. The are tearing up city streets to move underground wires and infrastructure, because the tracks cannot be over them. When I moved into Milwaukee in 1956, they had electric buses with wires overhead to run the buses. They took out outdated trolley tracks, took down the wires and ran diesel buses.

sjb3

You know, I never really looked at it that way; what you say is actually quite valid. I was a brakeman (many years ago) on the Galena division of the now-defunct (and part of Union Pacific) Chicago & Northwestern Railroad. I worked a lot of coal trains that weighed in at 10,000 tons; that's twenty MILLION pounds, which would probably take a dozen passenger trains to equal, and I'm pretty sure was damned hard on the tracks...