ALSO, we need a President calling for a national system… and a legislation to write a federal law for it, including an SERIOUS eminent domain clause and a large budget. This SO could be done within 20-25 years with the right people running it and the right technology applied. America needs the economic stimulus and American people WOULD LOVE to take an alternative to flying these days.

Somehow, greed and corruption in the automotive and airline industry will prevent it though. You need a megalomaniac business man (who digs trains) to get behind this, to manipulate the nation’s status quo in the right manner. Who is that gonna be?

I hate to say it though, I think that America has passed away. Long dead and now the new America stands confused and in disarray.

A few comments based on a several decades of exposure to ideas and discussions re transportation.

1. As noted previously the solution requires really big thinking and really big ideas. Apollo Project-sized thinking and ideas. The existing rail system and its 150 year-old concept cannot be allowed to be the tail that wags the dog. The problem requires Jeffersonian-level visionary thoughts to be applied.

2. NASA has had a mandate for decades to study transportation issues ranging from earth orbit to our front doors and everything in between. They’ve studied everything from SST’s, SuperJumbo jets and airport capabilities to process 800 people and baggage unloading from one flight to connecting multimodal transportation and infrastructure. It would seem logical to have NASA deeply involved in the planning of this enterprise. The benefits being access to decades of investigation, NASA’s left-brainpower (good critical thinkers) and their (theoretical) separation from political and business influences.

3. An Idea Too Big: A Short Story
In 1991, a woman stood up in the Hingham, Massachusetts town meeting. The topic under discussion was the town’s position on the planned reactivation of a pre-Civil War rail route that ran through the town. The “Greenbush Line” was planned for commuter service. The woman, a critic of the Greenbush Line, cited a proposal made by a European company back in the 1970′s to the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority. It was proposed as a solution for high-speed transit for Boston’s expanding South Shore communities. The concept proposed a monorail that ran in the median of Massachusetts Route 3, an important north-south limited access highway. It took advantage of all of the connector routes already in place. It settled NIMBY issues. It was a green solution. It would involve high-tech MIT-level problem solving that Massachusetts has long been famous for. Best of all it could become a revolutionary national model for high-speed transit solutions. It made such terrific sense.

Of course the idea was dismissed and ultimately “the easy solution”, the diesel-powered, 40 mph, already obsolete, rail line was built and opened a few years ago. The Big Idea was dismissed because it was literally too big an idea for the small-thinkers and vision-impaired that I normally associate with most public problem-solving. Certainly it was a concept with difficult technical problems to overcome. But so was the Apollo Project. The missing ingredient was a JFK-level vision with its “we do it not because it is easy but because it is hard” inspiration. I’ve often wondered if that project had been built how much we would have learned from that model that could have been applied to high-speed national transit system today and in the future.

4. The above concept would well apply to the Boston-Washington corridor since Amtrak’s existing rails are speed-constrained due to their ancient location. A totally new solution would allow truly high-speed travel here. And the problems it would be forced to solve could be applied elsewhere, even globally.

5. It’s time to reread JFK’s speech at Rice University made on September 12, 1962.

Look at Ohio. You can’t go from Columbus to Toledo, Detroit, Chicago, Indianapolis or St. Louis. There’s no direct Detroit-Toledo-dayton-Cincinnati route and no direct Columbus-Pittsburgh route.

At the same time, there is a curious stub end route to Lima and a weird line from Ashtabula to Charleston, WV via Youngstown, Wheeling and Parkersburg. Both of these would be dogs as far as ridership goes and the latter would cost a fortune to build in the mountainous territiory south of Parkersburg. Ironically, Youngstown would have no direct east-west service, just this odd north-south route.

Even the 3-C Corridor does a dog-leg at its north end, which will slow running times and push up costs. Same for Cleveland-Toledo-Chicago, which does a dip down to Ft. Wayne and back up to hit South Bend.

It looks to me as though the map was drawn without regard to present and past travel patterns. It also looks like costs of building in some locations were not taken into account.

I think we’d be better off to stick with a map we already have—The Ohio Hub—and go from there. If were up to me, I’d start with what we had running in 1962 (to pick a year—the map is at NARP’s website: http://www.narprail.org) and overlay that with the Midwest High Speed Rail Initiative, the Ohio Hub and other services. That would be much more logically laid out, I believe.

Finally, I think that we are fast approaching a time where we will be forced to make radical changes in the way we move people and freight. There will be a massive shift to rail and that means we will be more focused on moving the masses and keeping the nation mobile, rather than building a lot of very high speed lines.

We likely will build a lot of 90 mph lines, 110-125 service on key corridors and a few 125+ mph routes. Frequency will by a key part fo this. Many routes could support a dozen or more round trips even now. Some could carry service 24/7.

In addition, we could finance these improvements by having some passenger trains carry containerized, high value shipments (think FedEx, USPS, UPS, etc). Bringing more players into the mix makes financing easier, since costs would be spread more.

Containers could be roll-on/roll-off for service to smaller towns and intermodal containers for larger shipments.

Electrification? Yes, at least on the busiest corridors, especially if we get into a Peak Oil scenario. We will have to move away from dependence on diesels. Stiil, electrification is expensive and can’t be justified for secondary routes, at least not right away.

Finally, I just want to that I am not here to pan what’s been done. I do think the site is well put together and could really be of value as we move forward. I would suggest that the author study plans put forth by others and incorporate them into what he has.

Building a HSR link from O’Hare to the Milwaukee airport (and continuing downtown) makes enormous sense. Integrating baggage handling and ticketing into the transportation service is even smarter. If United thought of itself as a transportation company rather than an airline, they could expand their service and reduce their costs. They could sell their takeoff and landing slots in Milwaukee, free up their planes for longer haul (more profitable) flights and actually provide more reliable service (think snow closings of O’Hare in winter and thunderstorms in summer–probably won’t stop the train).

The airports already have infrastructure in place that does not exist at most rail stations:: hotels, rental cars, parking, etc. that make these kinds of connections the smart way of doing business. And conceived intelligently, it could draw the airlines in rather than making them opponents. Add Minneapolis, Indianapolis, Detroit, and even St. Louis to the O’Hare network (with a few intermediate stops) and you’ve just eliminated the need to build the $20 billion third Chicago airport. Now that’s a smart investment!

We all hope for a Federal program, but the Governor of Ohio has authorized Phase I of the Cincinnati-Columbus-Cleveland route in this year’s budget. Let us hope it passes the State Legislature.

Binghamton-Cortland-Syracuse, on the other hand, would provide faster access to “the north and west” for Ithaca, Elmira, Binghamton, and Scranton. Therefore it should be included.

Eventually, both Scranton-NYC service (Lackawanna Cutoff) and Allentown-NYC service (any of several routes) should be added to the map too.

And in *another* area — the existing Amtrak Adirondack route is not the greatest even though it’s the one usually proposed for high-speed service. The west (NY) side of the NY-Vermont border simply has fewer people than the east (Vermont) side. Running up the east side of Lake Champlain is the logical thing to do, along the Rutland-Burlington-St. Albans corridor, before reaching Montreal. This is approximately the Vermont Railway route occassionally proposed for upgrades to passenger service.

Yeah, these are all quibbles. But getting the city connections right *matters*. The fact that Detroit currently lacks a reasonable rail route to NYC — change via Chicago?!? — is very important. Building a rail route to Ithaca but making it stupid would be a way to handicap it badly.

You need a standard-speed line from Ithaca to Syracuse. Connecting via Albany (!!!!) is insane. There’s a lot of traffic in direction from Ithaca north to Syracuse and points beyond.

Based on the topography and minimizing the need for new ROW, this would most likely run east from Ithaca to Cortland (also in bad need of rail service), and then straight north to Syracuse.

The map distorts the geography of central NY in a distracting way: Ithaca is actually *NORTHEAST* of Elmira, while the map shows it *WEST* of Elmira. Given that, service from Binghamton to Ithaca via Elmira would be vastly inefficient And it doesn’t even follow the existing line (which departs at Sayre, PA). Instead, Ithaca to Binghamton needs to be connected more directly. Even a route via Cortland (which is northeast of Ithaca) would be better than one via Elmira in terms of speed. If the goal were cost containment, the branch from Sayre would be used, and would still be better than an Ithaca-Elmira train.

One nitpick: you show “standard speed service” along the North Shore of Lake Superior between Duluth, MN and Thunder Bay, ON. Except for a short distance between Duluth and Two Harbors, no rail line has ever existed along that corridor, and due to the topography along there, no rail line likely ever will.