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And Brightline and Texas Central will be, at least largely, privately-funded. All will operate very profitably when finished.

The U.S. will, eventually, have true HSR, probably before 2030. What is unclear is which line will be first. It will probably be Brightline West, with CAHSR following. It looked for a while that it would be Texas Central. Hopefully, they will get it together again now that Texas Supreme Court...

My pet peeve #1 is Amtrak's standard arrangement for coach passengers boarding trains which typically involves standing in line, sometimes for an hour. This is a result of the fact that a coach reservation isn't an actual seat reservation, so everyone who wants to sit together, or face forward...

The FRA analysis is based on building an entirely new railroad for most of the distance on routes that can be operated at a profit. My analysis is that this would be something in excess of 6000 route miles nationwide. This is nothing like the 24,000 plus miles that China has built to date.

For some years now US DOT regs have required all platforms to provide level boarding except when on track owned by a freight railroad AND in use for freight. Platforms of any height located on a curve will have a gap. There is no exception for curves. Best solution would probably be to use...

This is true in Germany. Perhaps other countries, as well. Press releases have said that the design of the 83 Siemens trains is set to be done in 2023.

I really hope that Amtrak moves toward universal advanced seat selection on reserved trains, as is pretty much consistently true on European trains. The business of making passengers at originating stations stand in line for extended periods to protect their chance of getting a decent seat...

The reason that the V2 sleepers were purchased was to be able to add cars (capacity) on the Eastern trains which are shorter than was historically the case. There was an expectation that supply/demand would lead to fares somewhat lower than the crazy high prices being charged but still resulting...

The law was changed in about 2008 to make clear that Amtrak has to fund operations of long distance trains itself while regional trains (less than 750 miles) are now "state-supported" service. I don't think that there has been a new long distance train established for years; it would...

Seems as if electrifying the 1st Street tunnel is critical. With the the next generation of NEC trains on order being dual-mode this would seem to be doable. Does anyone know its vertical clearance?

Correct. Platform widening can be accomplished pretty easily by removing the unused baggage platforms (a holdover from when passenger trains handled huge amounts of mail and Railway Express) and shifting alternate tracks into that space. The few widenings now proposed were identified as a...

Generally, yes. Superliners on Capitol Limited have operated via the South Shore when the NS was blocked.

Hiawatha and Chi-STL services are now running pretty reliably but the speed and frequency on both is capped by the Class I owners. The only way that we will get the fast, frequent service that the market will support outside of the NEC is by assembling publicly-owned alignments that can upgraded...

I believe that Pere Marquette is using Superliners.

I'm sure that a major reason that is no BC on Hiawathas is that the train lengths had been maxed out for years. There have been 7 daily RTs for 30 years. Before pandemic several peak trains were totally full. It would not have been possible to give up the seats. We need a publicly-owned...

Why is a stub end station planned? How do we know that? Is this a done deal?

With the money now available from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) this would be the right time for Indiana to respond to the FRA Request for Expressions of Interest for Corridor Identification. Interestingly, the FRA Midwest Regional Plan found that Chicago-Indianapolis high-speed rail...

The proposed 1% sales tax should be able to handle this pretty well. Sounds as if the pieces are falling into place nicely.

How hard would it be to construct a rail link extending Sunrail from Sanford along an I-4 routing to a new connection to FEC at Daytona creating an Orlando-Daytona-St. Augustine-Jacksonville route?

To summarize the situation, Brightline was ready to pay for the link from Orlando Airport and Disney, essentially on a nonstop routing that did not go by any logical places to stop. Lots of people in both the public and private sectors wanted them to use a routing that would stop at the...