Then what is the point of keeping the Acelas. If we spend money to upgrade parts of the corridor to 150 so the Acela can reach top speed a little bit more often then there is no real future thinking?
Where is the money to buy anything to replace them with? What do we do just stop the service and call it a day?
And if we upgrade sections to 220 in anticipation of faster future trains-- then we effectively outmode the Acela
Again, time for reality check. I really doubt that anything on the current alignment will get upgraded for 220mph.
Let us pull out an envelope and scratch a few numbers on it to see how things fall out....
There is a sum total of the current 33.9 miles and the following additional segments that can be pushed upto 150mph, with a little bit of help from FRA in relaxing their underbalance rules on curves:
Mansfield - Rt 128 12miles
With signaling/ACSES upgrade and CT catenary south of New York we can get:
County - Ham 23 miles
Morris - Torresdale 16 miles
Trainer - Landlith 10 miles
Ragan - Prince 30 miles
Halethorp - Landover a little less than 20 miles with several breaks in between
There will be speed restriction lower than 150 between these segments. So even if one could bump up the max allowed speed to 220 in these segments, typically at enormous cost one might add, it is going to be nothing like the TGV or Shinkansen. The problem is one does not get straight shot high speed run over long distances, which is what gives the high average speeds on the true HSRs. And still they will have to run at pokey speeds through most cities, and arm wrestling with enormous volumes of commuter traffic. along most of the corridor. One will be doing a lot of speeding up and slowing down.
The real issue is that for all our troubles to get all these segments upto 150mph we will get a net running time reduction of around 5 mins vs. 135mph in all those segments. The real problem in the NEC is not the top speed, as much as is the frequent and inconvenient speed restrictions that one faces. Amtrak has actually taken the reasonable step of trying to mitigate the worst offenders, e.g. CP Shell, the Baltimore Tunnels etc. the best they can with limited funds. But even then events seem to overtake their good intentions. They put down a good quality railroad in CT only to have Shore Line East setup operations with boarding platforms only on one side of the double track railroad thus requiring trains to cross over from one side to the other all the time, which has negative effect on running times.
Given all this my suspicion is that we won't ever get anything running regularly at over 300kph (186mph) if that on the current NEC alignment. If we are able to get the roughly potentially 150 miles capable of taking 150mph to 186mph, and that is a big if, then we save another 12 minutes. How much is that worth?
So frankly, from a speed perspective, I would not worry too much about outmoding the Acela on the NEC for its effective lifetime which is another 10 to 15 years. Of course if someone comes up with 40 billion dollars to do a completely new alignment that is substantially in tunnels and/or on viaducts like the Shinkansen is, I might reconsider this stance that I am taking here.