We looked into this! If you want to go regional range, you really need high speed rail (who's trying to sit on a train that goes slower than cars on the highway...)
High speed rail is prohibitively expensive. Besides the rail itself, you need to do grade separation from the ground so the rail can be flat, environmental impact studies, and in the US where private property rights are very strong, you might need to pay the land owners.
Look at the proposed price tags of the past 4 high speed rail projects in the US (none came to fruition):
- California High Speed Rail: $77B
- Acela High Speed Rail (NE Corridor): $150B
- Texas Central: $20B
- Virgin Trains Florida High Speed Rail: $4B (just Orlando to West Palm!)
I wish it was as simple as electric trains! Would save us a lot of engineering...
To complement this, the Acela has a top speed of 150 mph; it can only travel that fast for ~10% of the distance between Boston and DC though [1]. It fastest leg from NYC to DC averages 82mph (about as fast as driving on 95 at night ;) )
The US isn't very good at building large infrastructure projects. Boats and planes have the unique advantage that you don't need a lot of infrastructure along their path of travel, unlike a high speed train.
Also this can be used as a replacement for a ferry. Note how two of their launch customers operate in the Caribbean, where travel between islands is a big deal.
That was almost three-quarters of a century ago, the US is a very different, chaotic, and dysfunctional country (see: California High-Speed Train Fiasco).
We can do both lol. Aerospace engineers building a ground effect vehicle are not the same people as the people doing regulatory work to run train lines
Is it a real solution when for some strange reason it's impossible to build them?
Also I love trains. I moved back to Miami and there is a train called Brightline that goes from Miami to Orlando. It's extremely nice and my preferred mode of travel. Imagine if we had a bullet train that just spanned the entire east coast...
Eminent domain isn't that popular anymore unfortunately. Florida being one large empty red state, it's a lot easier to muscle 500 miles of new track into what's already there. To go up the whole east coast you'd have to wrestle with a half dozen different political machines. Even just limited to Florida, the line hasn't gotten past West Palm (yet), and was stalled for years due to lawsuits from just 2 counties.
It took 22 years and almost $7B to build 22 miles of MRT (not high-speed rail) just outside of the DC beltway, and much of the route had an existing right-of-way. It's a populous area, but the DC to Boston route is quite heavily developed.
