I hope in 20 years it'll be possible to take a train from Miami to Orlando to Atlanta to St Louis to Kansas City to Denver to Salt Lake City to Las Vegas to Los Angeles, with the minimum speed being at least 200 MPH except near those city stops.
This is all well and good, but the reality is that with all the other ecomonic issues facing the country, the possbility of high speed rail becoming part of the future is going to be severely limited.
One of our economic issues is the quantity of petroluem we're importing.
Electric trains and trolleybuses are really the only proven technology to address this problem.
I wouldn't be surprised if a certain amount of local mass transit is more cost effective than high speed intercity rail, but we're going to reach a point of diminishing returns on local mass transit after a certain amount of construction.
Even if biofuel turns out to be viable, highway crowding and airport crowding are problems that may turn out to be better addressed by rail than highway and airport expansion. Congestion has its economic costs, too.
At this point in time, I know of no firm, funded and designed plans for high speed rail anywhere in the country. Time is not on the side of this kind of technology, since it will literally take decades to design systems, determine priorities, get dedicated space for new tracks, order, build and purchase equipment and change the attitudes of the traveling public.
I thought the expectation was that California high speed rail may be operating revenue service within less than 10 years.
Amtrak saw great increases in ridership during the period when gas prices were $4 and higher, but with gas now at considerably lower prices, ridership is falling - primarily on the NEC. Part of this, of course, is the lessening of business related trips on the NEC and who knows when and how long it will take to experience an ecomonic recovery - and at what cost. Someone has to be the champion of high speed rail and I don't see anyone (individual or state or federal government) who is taking the lead.
Part of the problem is also that I believe Amtrak sets bucket prices 11 months before the train rolls out of the station, and then doesn't adjust them for changing economic conditions. I bet if they added some last minute low bucket seats, they could lure passengers away from the buses and fill all the seats on the trains.