Currently, even someone intently wishing to travel by train has to often chose otherwise because of the need to add another day off from work for travel time at each end for midday departures or arrivals.
Consider Boston to New Orleans. At 220 MPH, I could depart Boston in the evening and be in New Orleans the next morning. With the current schdule, it's two days and a night.
That, along with other onerous obstacles found on AMTRAK's system not encountered with either driving or fying, such as the ability to take along pets and the fact that the cost of traveling by train multiplies with each additional person traveling in a party such as a family, instead of the cost being divided by the number of passengers per party as with driving, make train travel unattractive. That severely hinders AMTRAK's ridership potential.
These problems are actually relatively easy to fix if Amtrak had sufficient funding to buy more equipment, and then addressed the families traveling with appropriate companion/group fares.
I agree. The trip between Boston and New Orleans could be only 36 hours (two nights with only one day in between-- effectively, only one "day") with current, conventional speed
if trains departed origins in the evening and the largest cities every twelve hours apart, arriving at destinations in the mornings.
That could poise AMTRAK to become a high-volume, high-ridership, high-revenue national business and commuter rail service. With the potential revenue from the current rush hour and hour-long flight traffic, AMTRAK could certainly have the revenue to afford its own equipment purchases (and leases, which it would need in the short term with such high traffic volume), even at $3 per coach seat for each station passed, $12 per roomette and $24 per bedroom for each station passed.
I'm waiting for AMTRAK to resolve the other issues.