Originally Posted by Slartibartfas

While I do agree with you about the feasibility of subterranean high speed rail, I highly doubt your numbers afterwards.

I guess it bases on the senseless assumption to connect the entire US with high speed trains like it was done with conventional trains a century ago. If thats the assumption behind the number its a straw man. No one plans that or demands that.

The point is rather to connect all cities with each other per high speed rail where the basic criterias are met. Principally as a rough rule one could say that high speed is highly competible where the cities can be connected within 4 hours, its still feasible up to 6 hours I think. If more cities are following one to each other, the network can be enlarged far beyond that restriction though, because every conglomeration can have the potential for itself.

Actually you could connect a quite substantial numbers of US cities while meeting those criteria. Of course there will be no Atlantic-Pacific crossing built, but thats not the task anyway.

For such a realistic task there can be impossibly the need for 500 times of the yearly federal budget, unless your federal budget is a joke. The reason why I believe that is that Europe was able to build up in the somewhat 30 last years a substantial high speed network without spending an extremely large part of its budget (even though it spend a certain amount of course) on high speed rail.


PS:
For all who are interested into it. Here is the best map of the European high speed network, its incomplete but still pretty good

http://i132.photobucket.com/albums/q...rnEurope20.gif