What I’d really like to see is long distance tourist trains, i.e. Chicago-Denver-Ski Areas (Winter Park specifically). I picture a sevenish departure from Union Station, with stops in Des Moines and Omaha. There’d be full dining and bar car services and breakfast would be timed for climbing the foothills. When the train pulled out from Moffat Tunnel into a new station where bags would be transferred to hotels (along with check in), lift tickets issued and travelers would ski right onto the slopes (for those of you who’ve never been to Winter Park, the west portal of Moffat Tunnel is at the base of the ski slopes). The return would leave at dinner time Sunday evening delivering skiers before work on Monday.

The decor would have to be “modern alpine” (Pioneer Zephyr perhaps?) and in summer the ski space would and could be used for camping/hiking/backpacking equipment and would be routed to the National Parks. Of course, this would kill off a lot of Wisconsin’s ski industry, but would certainly be easier than driving to Devil’s Head or Alpine Valley for a weekend trip.

I do have to take issue with your Cross Canada prioritisation, though. According to the VIA FAST study back in 2002 (available from the High Speed Canada site (http://highspeedrail.ca/)), the following are the trips between cities in the Quebec – Windsor corridor.

Montreal – Quebec City – 6.9 million trips (a staggering 90% by car)
Montreal – Ottawa – Toronto – 4.4 (Mon-Tor) + 3.5 (Mon-Ott) + 2.4 (Tor-Ott) = 10.3 million trips
Toronto – London – Windsor – 3.0 (Tor-Lon) + 1.8 (Tor-Win) = 4.8 million trips

Obviously the Toronto-Windsor portion doesn’t include Toronto-Detroit traffic, or traffic coming from Ohio or Chicago, but the border crossing between Windsor and Detroit get traffic volumes in the 1000s per day, not 10000s, so I don’t know that those trips would add substantially to the Toronto-Windsor volumes.

These numbers would suggest that Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal or Montreal-Quebec City would be the first priority, with connections between Ontario and Western New York and Quebec and New York prioritised over a Detroit-Windsor connection.

I’m just now getting a first look at this proposed network, and I was wondering about something in the southeast region. It seems to me that it would make a lot of sense to route a 150-220 corridor from Minn/Chi to Miami. By making the Macon – Savannah route a 150-220 corridor, and then continuing from Daytona Beach to Miami with the same. Keep the Daytona Beach – Tampa at 150-220, but it would seem more practical to make the Tampa – Miami segment at 70-120.

I look forward to researching this more. Thanks!

But now we’re talking about affordable short stretches within those longer corridors. D.C.-Richmond and Tampa-Orlando Airport. We could use breakouts to compare the value and viability of these corridors-within-corridors contenders.

I still think California HSR will get the largest piece of the $8 billion plus pie, about $3.5 billion. Florida could get as much, with the advantage that it’s a stand-alone segment that could be funded and finished before the end of Obama-Biden’s second term.

These “true” HST contenders don’t leave much for the incremental improvement candidates, obviously. Not that I’m convinced the others deserve it.

The Chicago-Springfield-St Louis line that I used to think had the inside track only ranks #25 by Yonah’s calculation. Meanwhile, its price tag has climbed to $4.5 billion, for an unimpressive four-hour trip.

http://www.chicagobusiness.com/cgi-bin/article.pl?articleId=32548

And after a study of the recent Amtrak report on the NEC, if I were on the Obama-Biden-LaHood team, I’d punt. ‘The NEC is too important to be part of this little $8 billion pie. It will need congressional action on its own, next year.’

That play could allow one of the feeders into the NEC to become the demonstration line for incremental upgrades — Springfield-Hartford-New Haven, Albany-NYC, Harrisburg-Philly, or Richmond-D.C.

Remember the discussion of the Keystone Corridor here a month or two back. That Pennsylvania project aims to add a million or so passengers, the same as the Chicago-St Louis upgrade, for a lot less than that $4.5 billion Illinois project.

But Richmond-D.C. could easily grab a billion in a swing state with a bipartisan record of support for passenger rail.

Or perhaps use a billion or so to sprinkle around a dozen states or more, mostly to keep hope alive and the pressure on Congress to appropriate many more billions.

But over all it looks like that all ten of the high speed rail corridors would need to have large sections of them built at once to keep the states happy. They could take 10 billon out of that 68 billon that eather Bear Sterns or Morgan Stanely is starting to pay back to the Goverment or they could take 3 billon from the 16 billon that GM is saying they are planning on giving back to the Goverment. A small section of this bailout money could build whole high speed corridors.

But there are other states which would fit the bill. Virginia or, even better, North Carolina. Both may have gone for Obama in 08, but Virginia just elected a Republican governor by a substantial margin and North Carolina is, apart from its 08 Presidential vote, still solidly Republican. And as was just mentioned in another thread the Republican Mayor of Charlotte (one of the end-points of the NC HSIPR proposal) is notoriously pro-transit.

As pointed out above, LA-SF, St L-Chi, and the NEC are all blue state specials, and it wouldn’t look right to fund them alone. But of course, HSR requires big, dense metro areas, and as Yonah pointed out, they usually vote Democratic.

Still, no point in giving billions to red state Texas, or thinly populated Louisiana. Better a swing state, and Florida is perfect in that role. Even the chosen route, Tampa-Orlando Airport is in the swing region of the swing state. And the ranking Repub on the House Transportation Committee is from Florida. If he can be kept on board, it will restrain Repub criticism.

It’s also the perfect demonstration route, short enough to be affordable and easily finished in a few years. Then it will become like the damn Disney monorail. Seems every time there’s discussion of future transportation, somebody proposes monorails. Well, duh, they saw it at Disney World and Epcot, described as transportation of the future. We should be so lucky if half the future visitors to Disney World go home ready to support HSR.