High speed rail could share track with commuter lines in some cases, as acela does in the northeast corridor. And building through the rural parts of the state is generally easier, California essentially decided to only build the rural segment of their high speed rail due to cost.

But in general you're correct that projects requiring new right of way are very challenging and expensive. Especially high speed rail with limited turn radius. Since the article mentioned a low-usage rail link between the cities, I would prefer to see a campaign to increase ridership. Maybe you could incrementally upgrade segments of that route that could support high speed rail.

Does sharing track ever work? Amtrak already has to share track with freight, and that's why Seattle to Portland is officially "3.5 hours" but the margin of error on that is +hours.

Not from the PNW, but it sounds like amtrak rents track from a freight line to run this route. So it works in the sense that they got something resembling inter-city rail service for a tiny fraction of the capital costs up front.

Even so, I'm guessing that there are options other than $50B of high speed track to improve the route. Maybe there's a few segments of track where a large fraction of the delays happen, and 30 miles of amtrak-owned track would really improve on-timliness. Just getting it from +hours to +minutes might draw some new users.

You cannot share track. Take a look at the ICE lines in Germany. The high speed sections are dedicated, with no level crossings and fencing the entire way to eliminate collision risk.

When a train is going 400kph, you can’t share track.

> When a train is going 400kph, you can't share track.

Correct, you would be traveling at normal train speed on shared track. This is workable in some systems because you can build cheap (relatively) rural segments of high speed rail without needing new right of way through urban areas. Obviously wouldn't work everywhere, and maybe it's not the right solution here. But it is done some places, and places like California are considering building new blended systems [1.

[1] http://www.caltrain.com/projectsplans/CaltrainModernization/...

> High speed rail could share track with commuter lines in some cases

Having ridden those very commuter lines, I can say that is not an option here. They are limited to 40mph along those routes because they follow a very windy path along the shoreline. There have been derailments from trains going too fast.

it's not one of the problems with the us rail system, that the infrastructure is owned by private transport companies?

how could you improve those railways if they are not yours to modify on first place?

It’s not. This is a pork project for anyone paying attention. If approved, this would be another disastrous boondoggle.

Isn't that worrying? That your country cannot do large infrastructure projects anymore. The US mamaged to build the interstates in the past and other poorer countries like Spain have successfully built extensive high speed railway networks.

>That your country cannot do large infrastructure projects anymore. The US mamaged to build the interstates in the past

The political right has convinced a large portion of the US population that _any_ government spending is wasteful and unnecessary. Those people don't see government spending as an investment, they see it as theft.

That's a pretty ridiculous strawmen argument.

>Anti-tax activist Grover Norquist famously declared, "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."

And his name is often invoked because he's such a fringe extremist. I doubt even 5% of Americans would agree with him, much less the ~40% who identify as right-leaning as you seem to imply.

It does not really matter whether those ~40% would agree. It only matter what portion of those would vote for someone who does. As a floor for that number I would submit that the Freedom Caucus has 32 of the 198 Republican seats in the house (~16% or Republican seats). Those Representatives have pretty much declared that they agree with him. So some percentage above that.

He holds a massive amount of sway within the Republican party.

Yes that is worrying and true. And it means that the upcoming century won't be America's the way that the previous ~century was. But that doesn't mean that we should just embark on the boondoggle anyways. If a once-capable professional athlete is aching and in pain and can't perform the way he used to, the solution isn't to step out on to the field and just give it a go. It's to fix what's ailing him first, or to just accept that his career is over.

Definitely and it highlights issues all around from the pork vehicles such that road budget proportion is a proxy for corruption to the idiot racist NIMBYs who block public transit claiming it will bring burglars to the neighborhood - when anyone can tell you trying to move furniture on a train is not easy, and a train with police on board and in phone contact is pretty much the worst escape vehicle you can choose.

Not really, the reality is there isn't enough demand for this kind of project. Between the fact there isn't that much traffic between these cities daily already and the terrain I have a hard time seeing this being worth it over air travel.