I ride the North East Corridor rails often and have clocked the Acela at 130 MPH via GPS going into Boston, and the Northeast Regional hits 115 MPH in spots from Eastern CT to NYC.

The route is just too winding for those speeds in so many places and you end up going 60MPH for much of the trip.

The best views going north are past the Connecticut river, rolling through Niantic, to New London and the small coastal villages like Mystic, and heading south the rail bridge that runs next to the Triborough gives you a fantastic panorama of Manhattan's east side.

I love the train.

I've clocked Acela at just below 150mph on my GPS in between Providence and Boston. As I understand it, they would like to go faster in other sections, but the track / catenary isn't able to sustain that speed on most of the journey. Still way better than flying for BOS<->NYC or NYC<->WAS. It's a shame that the ticket prices are 2x what the regional is though.

Never heard about having dedicated rails. It would be nice, since the FRC requires any train that travels on track shared by freight to be basically built like a tank, which makes them much more expensive to make an operate.

Very sad since IIRC Acela was supposed to have its own high speed rail but runs on existing track due to budget

> and heading south the rail bridge that runs next to the Triborough gives you a fantastic panorama of Manhattan's east side.

For anyone else interested, that's the Hell Gate Bridge[0]. It's odd, I'm in the generation that will always think of the Triborough as the Triborough, not the RFK, the same way others still think Interboro, not Jackie Robinson.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_Gate_Bridge

You don't need maglev for that, though, high-speed rail can reach those speeds.

And a big advantage of rail is that the trains can just run on conventional track and progressively go faster while portions of the track are converted to high-speed, while maglev needs a complete run of maglev track before it starts being usable.

High speed rail is often implemented using dedicated track wherever possible - either brand new or upgraded and restricted to other traffic types:

A closely sitting and smooth train wheel gets damaged pretty quickly traveling on track that is accustomed to freight traffic. That now-damaged wheel then goes on to damage the polished high speed track, which then further damages other trains' wheels in a vicious circle.

China's new high speed train network, for example, is almost all dedicated track (a large part newly constructed routes) with existing track used only where there are space constraints (for example, a city centre station).

French TGV runs on a significative amount of non-highspeed track though, and it seems to work good enough (about the same speed as China's HSR, and it has been working for decades).

I understand the TGV uses weight limitation and careful scheduling to mitigate the cost of other traffic (both wear-and-tear and scheduling), and as in the case of China also has sections of line that are unavoidably mixed, but used, as cost effective alternatives are not attractive. And I think that's the crux: a trade-off between cost and benefit. A new high-speed line is still margins cheaper than a maglev, though that's not to say I'd not like to see maglevs.

If this was reasonably priced, it would increase travel between those cities by a large amount.