One of the pleasures of visiting China is traveling on the high-speed trains.
For a lot of trips, it is faster than flying when you account for the time spent in airports and each end.
How’s that high speed rail system going in California? 
Have any of you priced an Amtrak ticket lately? In my experience, up and down the East coast, Amtrak always seems to be about twice the cost of a plane ticket over the same route/distance. Second class Amtrak fare from Providence, RI to NYC is $60 and the high speed Acella (Chris’ favorite for business) is $125 and that’s ONE WAY!
I can fly round trip Boston to NYC on Jet Blue for about $100 - ROUND TRIP!
OTOH, I can get a 10 days in 2 months Europass to go just about anywhere over there for $75 per day, unlimited travel and once you get to Europe, RyanAir can fly you all over the place for peanuts.
America has a LOT of catching up to do.
Amen to all these comments.
In the aftermath of the '08 real-estate bubble collapse, the USA spent about $1T for economic stimulus. For that amount of money, we could have piped a fiber-optic cable into every home in America and provided internet access in perpetuity, but instead we got "shovel-ready jobs".
Most of those jobs took 10 years to get done. Illinois got a "high-speed rail" upgrade to the Amtrak tracks from St. Louis to Chicago, which sounds really great until you learn that "high speed" in this instance means "up to" 110 mph.
But... the devil of course, is hanging out in the details. Freight rail still has right-of-way on these tracks, so Amtrak trains routinely sit for 45 minutes waiting on a load of coal or grain to rumble through. The trip still takes exactly as long as it did before the upgrade, because invariably the train is on the track waiting for a load of anhydrous ammonia or stopping at every third cow-town. There are 9 stops between St. Louis and Chicago.
Amtrak scheduled service may be 20 minutes early, or 2 hrs. late. The fee-schedule "floats"-- cheaper if you buy 30 days out, rising to astronomical if you buy at the station. One must pay to park at every station.
Europe's trains, by contrast, run on time and are almost free.
It wouldn't have taken $1T to fix the trains-- all it would have taken was a rewrite of the rules regarding rail right-of-way to give passenger rail precedence. We couldn't even get that done.
I may be in error, here, but I believe that Amtrak doesn’t own any of the track they run on. In the Northeast and much of east of the Mississippi, CSX, that great freight transporter, owns all of the trunk lines and now many local tracks. They dictate when passenger trains may run.
I’ve always been impressed by the Washington DC Metro. They ran the tracks right down the interstate medians with parking inside of the interstate cloverleafs. All of the other commuter rail services in America run a far distant “also Ran”, IMO, and I’ve ridden most of them.
@Gordon Nichols, I have noticed that there are many different Amtrak fares for the same trip, depending on time of day or day of week or who knows what.
@LI-Rick posted:How’s that high speed rail system going in California?
Rick, it's just as f'ed up as everything else in California (with no end in sight)!
As I've said before, Calif's only saving grace is the weather. I've always made it a point to not live near landslides (homes built on unstable hills), fires (homes built amongst poorly managed forests). and earthquakes (there's this thing called faults, avoid those areas).
California is a BIG state so there's lot's of scenic areas I can drive most anytime of the year. Yeah, there's that...
True story: At my old company, EMC, our flagship storage product had the ability to "mirror" data being stored on our product at one site to another site many miles away, like mirroring bank data in NYC over in Charlotte, NC or from Houston to Sacramento. We called it the "Remote Data Facility" and it ran over very high bandwidth Telecom lines (usually Fiber Optic). We also helped a lot of companies get their on-line business models up and running on the Internet back in the early 1990s, and one of those companies was Amazon, which built a YUGE! data center somewhere in Washington state outside of Seattle.
Flash forward a year or two and we get a request from the Amazon data center folks for a meeting with our Engineers over a problem they were trying to solve. What we found out kind of stunned us:
The had unknowingly built one of their first data centers on top of a seismic fault line (oops...) and were concerned that an earthquake might disrupt the center and customer service (this was the early days of what would become "Amazon Web Services" or AWS). They asked if it was possible to mirror an entire Data Center in real-time. (Wait....What?!? That can be pretty expensive.)
It took a while, but eventually we got them mirrored to another data center they built on the other side of the Rockies. They mirrored the entire data center, something like 2 or 3 Petabytes, which was a LOT of data back then (companies are now shipping a Petabyte in a single cabinet system these days). They were pleased enough to give the team members on both sides (us and Amazon) a big night out and team jackets. These days, just about everyone running "mission critical data" is running at least partial mirroring of their data, simply because there is so much data out there that it has become impractical to do periodic backups. If you're mirrored you don't need a separate backup.
That's "Data Mirroring 101" for this morning. Now back to the morning workout...
It took three years+ of upgrading existing track between Boston, NYC, Philly and Baltimore/Washington before the track was fit for the “high speed” Acela trains and most of the time they’re running under 80mph (it’s designed for 180mph). There is a single stretch of 35 miles between Boston and New Haven capable of speeds over 80mph. It takes the Acela 3 hours 50 minutes Boston to NYC. I can DRIVE there in four hours.
Yep, same in England with poor performing and expensinve trains. Although Europe is a different matter - I presume more space and high taxation made for great trains in France, and it is a fallacy that Mussolini made the trains run on time in Italy.
A single peak day return from Leeds to London, 195 miles, is £280 ($390). At least that train is reasonably fast (2hrs 15) compared to driving (4hrs). However, most other train journeys are quicker by car and far cheaper. And the roads may jam up but they don;t suffer from 'the wrong type of snow'. We got rid of all our branch lines back in the 60s thanks to the Beeching Cuts - 7000 miles of lines and thousands of small stations.