Here in Russia trains are rather popular. There are "high-speed" trains between Moscow and St Petersburg, they go around 200 km/h but they still take around 4 hours. Oh and they're made by Siemens, and they're capable of going faster, except their speed is limited by shitty tracks. Like you can't even walk in a straight line inside this thing while it's doing 200, so I imagine it'd shake itself apart if it tried accelerating any further. That's probably better than Amtrak, but Russian railways could still use a lot of improvement.